I started using Firefox again the day I heard about the 4.0 Release Candidate, and thought I could give it a another try after it failed to convince me the few times I tried to use it in the past.

I was pleasently surprised. The browser's way faster; launching it doesn't take that much time; the UI is way more responsive; and all the add-ons I've been using in the past are compatible with 4.0 (Web Developer, Firebug, Colorzilla, etc.).

I'm currently using it as my primary browser again, and it looks like it will stay on that podest for awhile.

It's awesome to see a browser resurecting with that many improvements, despite the fact that some people have almost written it off due to some annoying issues in past versions, the most prominent one being performance.

I'd really recommend you to give it a try.

Disclaimer: I've been using Opera 11 as my primary browser before I decided to give FF 4.0 a try

What I liked about Chrome: optimized usage of vertical space and speed. But what I really disliked about it -- Chrome add-ons are useless. Chrome would never allow something like Firebug without being built-in. And I couldn't find a plugin with proper Delicious integration either.

Also, searching the history in the address bar works a lot better in Firefox -- probably has something to do with the way Chrome encourages you to use Google. And speaking of History -- Chrome still doesn't let you search and delete items in the search results page. What's up with that?

Now Firefox 4 has it all -- the interface is still not as vertical-space efficient as in Chrome, but as I understand it on Windows tabs do move in the title bar, and that little change is coming for Linux too.

The new "menu in the upper left" seems to be rather badly designed. It's missing the "View" menu entirely, which makes it impossible for me to view non-ASCII/Unicode websites. It took me about 5 minutes of searching and frantically right-clicking to re-enable the old menu, which of course still had the View menu.

On a positive note, 4 is so much faster than 3.6 it isn't even funny. It's like going from a 286 running off of an 8-inch floppy to a Core 2 on an SSD.

To everybody asking what Firefox has that Chrome lacks: The Awesomebar.

I haven't seen it mentioned here but it's by far the thing I miss the most from FF (along with FireBug and TreeStyle Tabs). It practically replaces bookmarks for me because because it searches through the history. In Chrome it feels like I have to re-google everything unless I remember the exact url.

I've been on the FF4 beta for some time (the web app we work on is currently only supported on firefox). My honest assessment? FF4 is a huge improvement over FF3, specifically in terms of performance. It's still not Chrome though. Firebug works great in it (better than it does in FF3).

So yeah, if you've been using FF3 for web-dev or to browse, you're about to get a major upgrade. If you're a Chrome user I don't know of anything that would make FF4 especially attractive.

I'm a web dev and need to keep 3.x around. Can I easily install these two side-by-side or is that going to cause trouble for me? I'd love to use FF4 as my main browser at work (well, in competition with Chrome anyway) but I can't risk messing up 3.

Meh. One of the smoothest features of Chrome (that won a lot of adherents) was how you could close lots of tabs quickly without moving the mouse (i.e. the tabs only re-size after you move the mouse away). Same for opening tabs. How did FF4 not copy this? It looks just like Chrome only crappier.

I am surprised that they got rid of the padlock icon. I had to Google before I realized that they now use a colored section with the site name in the address bar to show a secure connection. Not very obvious when you first start using it.

I wonder if this change is going to be disruptive for users who are trained to look for a padlock icon.

Awesome timing. The latest version of chrome (10.0.648.15, Linux x86_64) hangs on Google Reader and doesn't work with Flash for me. That gives me an excuse to play with FF4 rather than futzing around downgrading chrome.

Text rendering in Windows is significantly worse - sometimes it's blotchy (random characters seem to have more weight than others) - particularly here on HN, and inter-character spacing is inconsistent; at others, the anti-aliasing looks overdone, and text looks blurry and over-smoothed.

I had Firefox 3 configured such that the main menu, URL box, navigation buttons etc. were all on the same toolbar - the menu bar. In that same configuration, Firefox 4 looks somewhat ugly - there's little space between the bottom of the menu bar and the page content (I also use tree-style tabs).

Apart from how it looks, and how it renders text, it's nice. The resizable gripper on multi-line text boxes is nice - that works well here on HN.

Edit: after disabling hardware acceleration, the text at least is much nicer. I don't notice any loss in performance in simple scrolling etc. with it disabled either.

Pardon me if this is a silly question, but I really love the tab UI feeling that I get in Chromium (the looks, the curves, etc.) Given that other projects like Kod.app already copy that feature, is it possible for Firefox to incorporate it as well?

I'm hopeful for the speed improvements; I was having issues with 3.6.x in that and so far 4 seems good but I've not really stressed it.

Otherwise, confess first impressions are less happy. Moving the tab bar has left it stranded adjacent to neither the edge of the window nor the page which makes it less easy to quickly grab sight of for me, and I seem to have lost the shortcut for the search box which I actually _used_ - if this replicated the old suite's behaviour of location bar searching outside the history I'd mind less, but it doesn't. Having to grab the pointer every time I want to search instead of Ctrl-E doesn't seem a win to me :-(

Firefox 4 still has a huge number of UI issues on linux due to reliance on XUL for the UI. There have been improvements in a couple extensions, as far as font colors using GTK themes go, but the menubar is still too tall and has the wrong font color (on basically every GTK theme and theme engine I can find) and keyboard shortcuts for several things (e.g. space to toggle menu items without closing the menu) are removed from GTK. Using RGBA with the murrine GTK engine, alpha transparency leaves "ghosts" on hovered menu options in Firefox, and buttons occasionally completely change their look pre- and post-hover (firebug had a drop-down that would "segment" itself when hovered, for example).

Add this to the completely non-native tabs and toolbar, and the lack of a status bar, and the UI is simply unusable imo. A native UI using an established toolkit, or a custom-built UI with usability in mind would both be preferable to the current halfway kludge.

Count me impressed. I use netbooks a lot and FF4 gave me the best browsing experience I've ever tried on a 10"-screen, Atom-CPU powered PC. Performance improvements and the amount of space it saves on a small screen for my usage are pretty amazing. Kudos Mozilla for another great release!

EDIT: Just noticed that FF4 allows me to resize text-fields that render quite small because of the small screen. Small, relative-sized text-fields can be easily resized to a convenient size.

I am so glad they got rid of the link preview in the URL bar (like they had in the RCs) and instead put in on the bottom left.

Usually, I have tabs open that change their title when something happens (e.g. Gmail Inbox(1), or Facebook), and those catch my attention from the corner of my eye. However, having the URL preview when hovering over a link go into the URL bar on top also catches my attention, and distracts me from my current workflow.

Am I the only one that does not understand why Firefox still has a 'Google search' field at the left? Why not use Chrome's approach and merge the two of them - at least give me the possibility to hide it. (And I am aware of the possibility so search in other sites than google, but I 'never' want to do that.)

I was REALLY hopeful for FF to make a comeback with 4. I had been a convert in the 2.X days and watched as it got bloated and slower throughout 3. Switched to Chrome in version 9 and never looked back. Then IE9 came out and was so much faster than before so I had hope for FF.

Well, that hope has been quickly dashed. How? By mozilla's own demo page, the web'o'wonder. On my three year old machine it says my video drivers don't support WebGL and won't play nice with many things. What it does play nice with was not very wonderful. The "Letterheads" were choppy with a framerate probably approaching 8 or 9 fps. The 360 video refused to load. Same with Remixing Reality. IE9 wouldn't work with those and neither would Safari.

Then I tried them in Chrome. Huh. Go figure. They all worked marvelously. Yup... this new web era could be a Web o' Wonders... but it looks like it won't be featuring FF4 or IE9.

Now, can anyone tell me why FF4 has issues with WebGL but Chrome 11.0696 doesn't? And it's not just a webkit thing because Safari 5.04 isn't liking them either.

I've been using the betas over chrome for a few months now. They've redone the UI, it's stabler, less memory intensive, and the UI is completely redone.It's definitely worth checking out even if you enjoy chrome.

Firefox user here since phoenix, switched to Chrome and never looked back. You can't come to par with Chrome to make me switch back, you have to make me shit my pants to do so, and Chrome did when they were the first to bring websockets to the browser. They kept bringing good stuff like web inspector, so no need to download firebug or any other extension. And joining the search bar with the address bar is just genius.

In short, I prefer my browser naked, and Chrome is the best without clothes.

I'm a little conflicted about the Firefox Sync feature. On the one hand: yay! On the other... it's a lot more difficult to set up sync in Firefox than in Chrome. I got to work today and was dismayed to discover that I couldn't simply login to Mozilla's server and sync up my bookmarks from home, but that I needed the sync key from my computer at home to get this working. Boo. That, or you need to have the devices you want to sync in the same place and use a Netflix-like "Add Device" feature.

I get it. Encrypting locally is more secure, but they've made this system SO secure that it's actually irritating. I wish I at least had the option of foregoing this sync key business.

Anyway, now I know to put my sync key on Dropbox so this doesn't happen again.

I really would like to see a built-in PDF viewerâ€"that's one of my favorite features in Chrome because it keeps the download folder clean and lets me reference several PDFs/pages without leaving the window.

I hope the addons also get updated for FF4. I upgraded to FF4, but I miss having the CS Lite addon.

'CS Lite' lets me manage cookie permissions for current site without having to go into the preference and go through the long process. Very useful since I usually block cookies and only turn on when needed. The reviews for CS Monster doesn't seem as good.

1. Sync is totally not up to par. It doesn't inform what it does in the background and there is no place to check on the web what it uploads. I am not sure why FF even bothered to release this feature when it is not even ready (there are several people complaining about many things of Sync at the Add-on review).

2. The bookmark/history manager can use upgrade/better features. Ever since the Delicious fiasco, FF could possibly play a better role in adding modern bells and whistles to its bookmarks manager.

- When on a laptop, I used to open a link in a new tab by right click + open in a new tab. This option was the second one in the previous firefox's version, now it's the first, so I end up opening a lot of links in new window instead of new tab, guess it's only a matter of time till I get the habit :)

Damn them - damn them to hell. The thing that Firefox 3 did in Winidows (XP anyway) that was so useful was that when you deleted trash or spam, it automatically put the pointer on the OK button. Not the OS preference, but a Firefox feature. It didn't work in OS X, but it worked in XP. They took that feature away - I saw it in the beta, but was hoping they really hadn't deleted it. Damn them.

After having some serious problems with the beta, I'm actually very impressed with this release. Even on my parents' old ex-council computer (1ghz P4, 512mb RAM, integrated graphics) this release is lightning fast!

Fascinating conversation. Thanks for giving insight into how these deals work...

>ABNB reminds me of Etsy in that it facilitates real commerce in a marketplace model directly between two people.

Interestingly enough, I still tend to side with Fred's assessment of AirBnB's future. All my experiences with it as a user have been too unreliable to expect that it can scale to truly massive usability. Selling your old guitar online is a lot different than renting a room to someone. Renting a room has so much more of a personal aspect to it.

There are so many more subtleties to actually having a stranger come and stay in your house than there are to sending a stranger a book, guitar, etc via USPS.

Regardless, I still think there's a massive market out there for this type of thing, I just don't see it swallowing up the whole Hotel industry.

I rented a room in L.A. using Airbnb. The owner of the room said he made $4000 in 3 months on two rooms that would have otherwise been vacant. If you're making this much money for people you've tapped into one helluva market.

1) Improved the perceived standing of PG among the entrepreneur-class. It proves that he really adds value the way he says he does - hawking, what can easily be seen as a very weird idea at a time when not many people see it.

2) Improved my perception of Fred. Even though he passed on the deal, he is stand-up enough to not only admit it - but allow PG to post this email exchange that shows that he was "one of the old guys" that were skeptical. It also shows that he wasn't just pulling PG's chain, but was really debating it internally.

In my experience, Airbnb's biggest competitor is HostelHero and I found this much more convenient than Airbnb while traveling (if only because hostels nearly always have space, unlike the many rooms we encountered on Airbnb advertised as free but suddenly not when you book them).

Arriving in a new city without internet it was great to have HH and be able to find 10 hostels and know they are going to be open. I guess McDonalds wifi etc. means Airbnb could have been a competitor, but the ease of finding accommodation reliably, of a reliable standard, and at more affordable prices meant we used HH far more than Airbnb.

Having said that, the times we could manage to find a room that was genuinely free, and appeared to be genuine people with a spare room, were some of the highlights of our travels. The people and the rooms were both fantastic, and it's this "home away from home" and social aspect I think Airbnb should be pushing. I think at the same time they should be working hard to remove the listings that I could best describe as dodgy guys trying to run a hotel out of an apartment building without adhering to local hotelier laws as we found these far too prevalent in some cities.

This exchange cements my concerns about AirBNB only being huge if they can end-run the hotel regulatory system.

pg: Did they explain the long-term goal of being the market in accommodation the way eBay is in stuff? That seems like it would be huge. Hotels now are like airlines in the 1970s before they figured out how to increase their load factors.

fw: So I think it can scale all the way to the bed and breakfast market. But I am not sure they can take on the hotel market.

The problem is, the regulatory system (not to mention the neighbors) do not want unlicensed, widespread "crowd-sourced" illegal hotel rooms, and are working hard to block them:

Paul Graham talks about the 'eBay' of accommodation -- but a huge percentage of eBay's revenue comes from professional sellers, which is exactly what will run afoul of regulation in the rental/hotel market.

It just seemed a very good sign to me that these guys were actually on the ground in NYC hunting down (and understanding) their users.

That's a funny comment from paul because he was the one to tell them to go to NYC. That they went is to their credit, but still. I think of this sometimes with the pitch coaching for demo day. How many investors think "that's a great way to phrase that" when watching a presentation and what they are actually hearing is PG? When you've seen a few of them, it is quite stunning.

I don't mean this in a negative way. It actually is just evidence that paul graham is a badass.

If someone still has any doubts about the value of YC, they should read this email exchange. PG is pushing for the startup as if it was his own. He genuinely wanted them (and also the VC firm) to succeed.

This is great stuff. You can't blame any VC for being cautious at that early a stage though, and although the idea of hotels using airbnb to list their vacancies hasn't happened yet, as far as I can tell, it may not even matter. I have just started trying them to rent my apt in NYC, lets see how it goes. Personally as a "landlord" I feel like I do a great job accomodating my tenant, but on a site like craigslist, which is where I'd been posting my listings, this never gets reflected as there are no opinions/ratings, etc. As a result, I can't "stand out" from other landlords. It's not hard to get tenants in NYC, but I can imagine in some other parts of the country or world this may be a bigger issue. This is where I hope airbnb comes in handy.

I was thinking about the impact of hotel chains' business traveler kick-back schemes (euphemistically known as "rewards" programs) on the independent room providers (a phrase I just coined to run the gamut between someone renting out his spare room and a boutique hotel) ability to attract business travelers. How, as a business renting out 40 rooms in a single city, do you compete with Marriott who can offer some guy and his wife a free weekend stay anywhere in exchange for funneling his company's (or even his company's client's) dollars toward their brands? What if ABNB offered up to these independent operators a rewards program similar to those offered by the big chains? They would move beyond be a transaction facilitator toward being closer to a consumer brand. I believe that lower-end hotel chains basically follow this model -- independent owners become franchisees of the brand as a way to get bookings, have a recognizable brand, etc. While I doubt that too many of today's ABNB bookings are business-related, that number will surely increase. I love playing armchair QB :)

I was under the impression that YC introductions were pretty much the equivalent of "hey, here are some guys...invest in them"...but here you can see that there is a lot more pressure....bordering on begging

Both Fred and PG are willing to a) admit mistakes and b) be totally transparent about it and c) publish that transaction for others to learn from put them BOTH in a class above and beyond traditional VCs.

Are you "other" guys listening out there? This is why YC is eating your lunch with new startups...

Thanks for sharing PG, this is fascinating! We as entrepreneurs are generally busy trying to sell you and we rarely get to see your approach when "pitching" one of your companies. Your point by point break down of a market and how a company can grow into it is very insightful. I am taking note of your use of character validation (cereal story), peer validation (YC poll), market/community focus validation (out talking to users) and master vision for my own future investment communications. So short, subtle, and to the point, love it!

Airbnb has definitely tapped into a latent market, but I wonder how such "rentals" may square with terms in lease agreements or condo association provisions. States and / or municipalities may quickly try to capture taxes, as Zipcar has discovered, or they may try to prevent or regulate such "rentals" on the basis of licensing, public health and safety, or other laws or ordinances. I wonder if the typical renter is properly reporting the income to the appropriate tax authorities.

Airbnb is a good startup but the founders struggled so much at first without gaining any significant traction. And even with PG's endorsement they still had trouble getting funding from a progressive-minded VC. I wonder if they (Airbnb's founders) could make it to this point without YC.

We tried to use airbnb here in Bali to search for a house but we had to give up as there were too many kinds of accommodations. Houses dubbed as villas, rooms dubbed as houses, one floor dubbed as a full house and even a gazebo where we were supposed to stay 2 months.All this is fine but I wonder how usable it will become once you throw the hotels in.

"If every developer was to focus on the very achievable goal of building a lifestyle/micro business â€" the entire house of cards would crumble."

If that happened, the whole world would crumble, because we wouldn't have any technology bigger than could be built by lifestyle businesses. Anyone who wanted to build a lifestyle business on the Internet, for example, would find that there was no Internet. You wouldn't have servers or routers or clients or backbones or local cable.

This article is not sensational. It does not tell you what you should do with your life. It does not say VCs are evil. It doesn't say funded companies are a waste of time.

The "if every developer" line is clearly just as much grandstanding as PG makes when he compares hackers taking a job to caging a lion. To take this line in this essay literally -- and be offended -- but not to take PG's line about lions literally is to be intellectually dishonest.

Here's what this essay actually says:

* there's a monetary reason that we're all soaking in VC/fund/"liquidity event" news

* there's a psychological reason that we seek out VC/fund/"liquidity event" news

* reading about this stuff isn't even the remotely same vein as working on it, or making real money

* the author is angry that he believes people are being pushed towards lives/businesses that don't make them happy

* every developer is capable of making a product for an independent income

* and everybody might be happier if they did

Gee, not so controversial, is it?

All the hullaballoo about this article can be only one thing: overly identifying with your life/business choices and attacking anyone who dares call them into question. In a general sense. Not in a PERSONAL attack, for example labeling someone's work "a lifestyle business" or "like duping credulous customers into overpaying for a time-tracking tool styled with this month's CSS trends".

The only reason anyone even paid attention to this article at all is because 98% of what everyone hears, all the time, is pro-big startup, pro-VC, pro-liquidity event, pro- this and pro- that.

There is so rarely a dissenting voice that the moment there is one, however mild, everybody is in attack mode.

I'd like to see this taken to the next level: some kind of diagnostic.

It's easy to point out the general case. What's difficult is taking the general truth and turning it into stuff to do right now. Answer these questions. If you answer this way, you are heading down the wrong path.

From what very little I've seen, this is something that everybody sees in everybody else but never see in themselves. Perhaps this is because it's easy to imagine somebody else having to "settle" for a business making shinier widgets for 3 cents profit per unit while we all easily imagine ourselves as being the person to "change X as we know it"

I have no idea why some of us are like this. I continue to struggle with it, and I know better.

I'm disappointed that this has gotten so many upvotes and positive comments.

There's a middle ground between web application "lifestyle businesses" (like duping credulous customers into overpaying for a time-tracking tool styled with this month's CSS trends) and trying to start the next Facebook.

There's nothing wrong with being a small software company. People have been doing it for decades now. It's boring, but there's nothing wrong with it. Don't expect anyone to celebrate you for doing it, though.

Our time on this earth is limited, and people's attention is even more limited. No wonder that more time and attention is put towards trying to execute on big ideas. Sometimes those ideas end up not working out, but we're all better, I think, for someone having tried.

As pg points out, the ideas that led to the businesses that have formed the infrastructure that enables web lifestyle businesses could not have, themselves, been lifestyle businesses. Someone has to think big, take risks, and deploy significant capital in the interest of a dramatically better world. If you don't want to be that person, great, but don't tell the risk-takers that they're "wasting their lives". Would you say the same to scientists who take big risks? Artists?

The media packaging of technology entrepreneurship is undeniably offputting. But that's no excuse for dim commentary like this.

I used to get frustrated by the mentality that Justin is speaking out against. That said, those of us building "get rich slowly" businesses simply don't need the support network that people making crazy bets need.

The huge risk, huge return world will always be exciting to watch and talk about, and it will always be splashing around waste money, so it will always get a disproportionate amount of attention.

Note: I can only speak for my industry (penetration testing and antimalware) so YMMV

Last month at DC4420 (the London monthly DEF CON chapter meeting):

<dude from corporate security firm>: How many people do you have at Mandalorian?<iuguy>: 6<dude from corporate security firm>: Really? I always thought you guys were bigger? So it's more of a lifestyle firm?<iuguy>: If by lifestyle firm you mean a company that treats it's people well for doing a good job - as well as they could do on their own - then yes. If you mean a firm that's focused on doing a good job doing work we enjoy instead of chasing cash and ticking boxes all day long, then yes.

I think http://www.fbtechies.co.uk/ was the first I knew of, but amongst us there's quite a few and it seems as though we're growing. I think the realisation of having a niche skillset combined with commercial ability makes for a compelling enough value proposition for people to go it alone outside the conventional areas.

We don't all need to be multibillionaires (although some do). For some of us it's the choice between working on yet another PCI box ticking exercise, or charming the pants off some cool experimental tech.

I would like to add though that the article really needs some data to back it up. While there's plenty of anecdata from patio11, peldi and (to some extent although I'm obviously not in the same league as those guys) me, a source of actual information would really blow the doors off.

"If you genuinely have the spirit of an entrepreneur inside of you, something about No True Scotsman".

This article, as much as any feature on Mark Zuckerberg, is entreporn. Is it possible to build a $10k-per-month web app? Sure. Easier than building the next Facebook (which is a matter of mostly luck, a lottery)? Absolutely. Are most people who try going to fail? Yes. Is it possible to get funding for a lifestyle business? No, that doesn't exist. So you need to do it on your own time, which limits your losses but makes your likelihood of success very low. If nothing is lost but one's time, is trying a lifestyle business possibly a great idea? Of course. But is making it sound easy to make $10k per month entreporn? Yes.

Also, as for lifestyle businesses, there are good and bad scenarios. A good lifestyle business provides reliable income at a decent rate (at least $100/hour) and the ability to control how much money you make and how much time you spend; if you want more money, you work harder. If you want a 3-month vacation, you take it but make less money. That's what you want: the freedom to decide how much you work and how much money you make. This is a great thing to have, and if some idiot hipster thinks it makes you a loser that you didn't cash out for billions, who cares? A bad ("walking dead") lifestyle business is one that just turned out mediocre and ends up had-by-the-balls by one or two clients who become, de facto, very demanding bosses. Companies like this exist: single-client consultancies that haven't gone out yet, but never got enough headway above the mediocrity of client demands to take off and become something.

> The absolute truth is that each and every one > of us can build a business that can support us.> ...> In truth, there is no reason to fail â€" other> than failing to learn from your mistakes.

Yes, maybe we can - eventually. But while we're building it, we still need a paycheck. Building a profitable business doesn't seem like the kind of thing you can do in your spare time, unless you're willing to sacrifice absolutely everything else in your life.

> But even better, once you have the knowledge that comes> along with building a succesful $10k/month business, you> also posses the exact same knowledge that it takes to> build a $100k/month business.

And then, why not a $1M/month business? And then $10M/month! Etc! Etc!

I'm pretty sure that a $100k/month business is an outlier, too, it's just closer to the center of the bell curve than Facebook, but still pretty dang far away from everyone else.

I started a lifestyle business. It did that, and very well. And then I became bored.

If a lifestyle business works for you, then that's what you should strive towards. Some would call me naive or childish, but if you're the type of person who dreams about changing the world, don't sell yourself short. Don't grow up, and don't give up.

I sense a backlash growing. It seems like the only time people take you seriously these days is if you're in your 20's, have a spiky-haired asian dude as one of your founders and are launching a social/mobile/streaming video app in a weekend. That's what they cover on TechCrunch but not what the vast majority of us out there are doing.

"The chances of building a Google, YouTube or Facebook and scaling to the millions of users required to be â€śconsideredâ€ť for VC investment are vanishingly small. We're talking in the region of 0.0001%."

You don't need millions of users to be considered for VC investment. More like 10,000 users if the service is free, or 100 paying customers. And it's really not that hard to do that, it just takes enough perseverance to make it through the first few iterations.

Embrace being a lifestyle business and ignore all the startup noise. Do your best to serve your customers and grow your revenue. You'll never get famous, but then again neither will 99.9% of the people who go the other route.

This post saddens me. Startups should aim larger, not smaller. That is, in my opinion.

The blog post (which I am interpreting as "every entrepreneur wants to raise VC and swing for fences") is generally wrong, in my experience. For every "a million dollars isn't cool, you know what is? a billion dollars" startup founder, there is one that insists that Groupon is over valued, and startups should monetize on day 1 and be in charge of their own destiny by retaining all equity.

There is no right or wrong answer in terms of what your aspirations are. But there is a huge audience of startup founders that are building lifestyle businesses, and killing it.

This exact point occurred to me as I was listening to Reid Hoffman define 'entrepreneurship' at SXSW the other day. His definition restricted the term to 'industry-disruptive technology' and 'big ideas'. I thought it was a pretty self-serving definition coming from an angel investor who needs those kind of giant hits to cover bad bets. It's also a lot easier to start what Mark Cuban is calling the Ponzi-style investment process where every round at successively higher valuations leaves the next group of suckers holding the bag.

I agree. You have no idea how much I agree.My small online business never made it to 10000 us a month, but I don't care.I am writing from a nice Balinese house with a great tropical garden where I'm spending 2 months.And then I'll spend a month in Sri Lanka.Then, maybe it will be China.I have been living like this for the past 10 years, working online and enjoying life as I never thought it was possible.So, go for your small business and be free, it's really much easier than it seems.And it's so beautiful.

Regarding the chances to build something super-successful:It's more interesting to hear about startups that fail. Seeing patterns emerging from failure is way more useful than trying to pinpoint what Google and Facebook founders have in common.

The problem I guess is that the failures mostly just fade away. A service where upstarters commit to write about their journey, especially if it goes bad, in exchange for helpful tips would be very useful.

I think there are already lots of software companies which aim not too high. Last time I heard there were 150.000 apps in the AppStore. There are lots and lots of indie game developers and casual game developers; a great chunk of them don't have the income to avoid their day jobs because they are not even ramen profitable. There are thousands of cheap shareware software on download.com. And lots of websites trying to generate money using adsense.

I agree that it may be a bad decision to aim too high, but there is also a possibility to aim too low: into markets where there is not much money or there is free stuff as competition. I've first made the 'aim too high' and then as a compensation I also made the 'aim too low' mistakes. Now I finally aim in-between.

While I agree that you shouldn't knock lifestyle businesses, I feel that the TechCrunch quote was taken a bit out of context. The "dipshit" companies looks like its referring to the kind of apps that have no business model but ride on the hopes and dreams of overeager VCs who swear this is the next Google. Anyone who creates a company without a business model and hopes to sell to Google for $25MM is a dipshit. But those aren't lifestyle businesses, so it seems like that quote was a bit irrelevant.

Wow, this is exactly what I was saying with a recent comment of mine (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2330900). There's a wide continuum of successes in the startup world. VC's are interested in the funding the top end, but many devs would probably be satisfied by a much wider swath, that could include wholly bootstrapped operations.

To me the point is that nowadays you don't have to get permission (in the form of someone else investing in your company) to get started. On your own you can fairly quickly build a business that pays your bills (your "lifestyle") and lets you escape "wage slavery". Once you do this, you have a lot of security and a lot of power/control over your next move.

I didn't think the point was to build a business that makes enough to pay the bills and then stop building. I'm certainly not stopping.

Most startups need VC money because their ideas are obscure, stupid, and market-less. There is nothing wrong with using your skills to build a simple small business to fill a market need. Anyone who feels guilty for trying to make money with their talent is a sheep and a fool.

The only problem here is that entrepreneurs are humans and as such they tend to swing for the fences. I know I do. Its the come big or go home mentality. Its the American way. Whatever you want to call it, its in our genes to do it that way.

Yeah we could all become the equivalent of craftsmen who had to then organize into guilds/unions to get a decent wage. Why do that when we can go home millionaires with the right idea/right money.

I think this article is just an original argument for bootstrapping. I don't think this guy is saying: "don't reach for the stars" - at least that's not how I interpret it. He's saying: "set achievable goals, lean how to execute, then you might just build a big ship organically."

I'm in a 3rd world country so $10K a month is more than enough for me to more things. Like 1. Start a foodstore, business; petrol stations (Startup cost around $50K), a popular restaurant etc. So this is what I'm doing now; trying to create a lifestyle business.

Github is pushing so many envelopes. I don't pay them any money monthly yet, but every single time I see one of these updates - it makes me want to open my wallet to just make sure they don't go out of business.

The people at github really get the social aspects of version control. This is one of those things that can make the designers get on board with version control for your project and make it useful for everyone and not just a chore for them. Great job!

Nice. What I would like to see is having swipe and onion skin modes working without dragging the slider: just move your mouse over images and get swipe position move along or opacity change accordingly.Of course, sliders should still be thereâ€"and make them bigger, Fitt's law, you know.Probably some more prominent indication for opacity would not hurt too.

One thing I see people saying on here is that people should care....and I do...but I don't know _what_ to do with it!

Can someone show/tell me what I, an average person, can do? It feels a bit overwhelming and things like this point out how powerless we really are. I hope I'm wrong and there are things we can do...I just don't know what they are.

EDIT -

Asking two more specific questions:

1. What can we do technically to be safe?

2. What can we do to fight this? Petition Government? Support EFF? Other? Very much at a loss on #2

This is literally years-old information. I was aware of and hollering about this at people as a highschooler at debate and speech tournaments. Same thing then as now, no one cares, or those that do care don't care enough.

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and Warrants shall not be issued, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

Am I missing something? Of course the problem is that it's near impossible get something like this to the SCOTUS. The only real possibility is more whistle blowing.

What you can do:1. Support the EFF, CDT and other orgs that work on technology and civil liberties.2. For truly private data and activity get religion with PGP, TrueCrypt, Tor and other tools. For the non-private stuff, take some sensible measures (see below)3. Consider sandboxing/compartmentalizing your online activity across disparate ids, browsers, machines, phones and locations. Definitely run Ad Blockers/Filters. 4. Stay current with EFF/CDT and related twitter feeds. There will be another privacy debate at a policy level. Get educated, push for the good guys.

I remember reading that long time ago. It actually made me quit AT&T and every time someone called me, I tend to ask or check their number and tell them you calling me from AT&T do you know about "the room"? Couple times my friends quit it for the same reason; others don't care. I guess the answer is switch to a different career.

I had a good laugh when I read (think it was Wikipedia) about that room. AT&T was sued over it... they defends themselves by 1) the room does not exist AND 2) this lawsuit should not be proceed due to Act of National Security setting aside lawsuit frames. LOOL! I dont know about you -- but to me first contradicts the second one :)) the judge only decided on count 2) -- that it is indeed NSA involved - so it was dismissed, but if there is NSA then the room exists, hahahaha!!

Not the first time US gov has violated US Constitution to spy on citizens..

People forget that the US President that first set a policy for this type of illegal behavior was Roosevelt leading up to WWII. Cable/Wireless companies were pressured by US Gov to record and copy cables sent by US citizens and to send those copies to the US government.

Did not stop terrorism than will not stop it now..and yet 70 years later and no one has learned.

So? This isn't the equivalent to papers secured in your household, it's data sent over someone else's network. I'm not a huge fan, but saying it's the same as the government walking into your house and examining all your documents is ridiculous.

Either way, call me when someone finds out they can decrypt and examine all the SSL traffic in real-time.

I was walking past the building wondering why they had .mil style no windows for such a large building. Other exchanges I had visited had windows. If we had collectively given the NSA rights to check our data, this would be ok. We didn't give them the rights. Think of the insider trading, that could be occurring by corrupt NSA officials.

One word of caution--do not, I repeat do NOT, focus on price ("we are cheaper") as the main reason for people to use you. People who are "priced out" of other solutions still need to buy in to whatever you are doing, beyond price, or else you risk losing those customers to your competitors should your competitors offer a cheaper/simple plan.

You're off to a great start (I just signed up for the beta), but make sure you do the hard work of selecting your target customer ("who will we NOT serve?") and don't preach price--preach superior experiences.

That is one awesome story, congrats! I was especially struck by some of the stuff you said about product/market fit. To me, this bit is pure gold:

We started engaging with our prospects on what they were currently using and what problems they were facing. In many cases people were telling us clearly what they really wanted to see in their customer support software.

Yeah, that's the key, right? Actually engaging with the customers and finding out what problem they're really trying to solve. This cuts to the core of sgblank's Customer Development stuff and the whole Lean Startup movement.

We were surprised to see that a lot of what customers wanted were their core problems solved and not some fancy features of supporting customers from their Facebook wall or converting tweets into customer support tickets. While we understand that these are definitely the way of the future, many many customers do not need this today.

Heh, perfect example of how us techies can get caught upin the fancy, glitzy, "cool" stuff and maybe not realize that customers are not so concerned about that, as they are getting work done. Really, really good reminder to focus on the customer's needs!

Another important learning for us was that customers did not want to be dealing with separate invoices for their helpdesk, their contact management software, for their customer feedback forums and customer satisfaction surveys. The SMB customer wants one invoice and as much functionality as possible in the customer relationship management solution.

That's gold too... It reminds me that sometimes the "problem" isn't so much a technical problem, as a structural problem with the existing business arrangements. Wanting one invoice instead of 3 or 4 is a wonderful example of a problem an entrepreneur can solve, and it doesn't have anything to do with product features or technology. Reading this is like having a glass of cold water thrown in your face (well, for some of us!)

We also identified underserved market segments (companies with multi-brand support requirements) and segments which were getting priced out because the current solutions were expensive.So we reprioritized our feature set to what we thought is the ideal product/market fit for us. This means that things like Twitter and Facebook integration can wait. But things like multiple support emails or support for SLAs and Business hours are in.

Very inspiring. Thanks for sharing such details about your experience. I think a lot of people can learn something useful from your experience. You've certainly given me some thoughts to chew on.

Zoho is most probably the best known tech startup from India that isn't in the typical call-center or medical transcription business. As key Zoho employees go on to build in their own companies, this could bring SV/YC culture in India where success does not mean finding a big check-writer from US but rather building products that users from around the world can use and buy. Keep up the good work FreshDesk.

Congratulations on the launch (and welcome to HN, since I see that your account is just 3 hours old :)

That said, your post suggests that you acquired domain knowledge at Zendesk, then decided to use that knowledge to immediately and directly compete with Zendesk with price as your only differentiatior.

I suspect that the folks at Zendesk aren't going to sue you on any non-compete or trade-secret agreements, but I'm curious to know if you think that your competition raises any ethical concerns or not.

[edit] Thanks for the correction, Aditya and apologies Girish for reading the post too fast and confusing Zoho with Zendesk

Now we have a team of six people - (3 developers, 1 UI/UX designer, 1 QA / Customer support engineer and me as - the Product Manager / CEO)

It would be great if you could throw some light on how you went about building this team and your hiring process. In my experience, it ain't easy here in India to find quality talent willing to work in an early stage startup whose product is still not out in the market.

It's a great post. But I'm posting here to gripe: why oh why do so many blogs never have a direct link to their business front page? It's always to the blog front page. You see a blog article posted, interesting read, the next thing you want to do is visit the front page. grrrr.

I have to say that your post on how to get a corporation in the US is fantastic. I'm sure there's a lot of information out there, and it's something many people have done before, but the fact that you laid it out extremely clearly and gave very relevant contact information is amazing. Really great stuff.

Great focus on MVP and a lean team. Designing a usable service for outsourced "enterprisey" software is challenging because your customers (a company's HR dept, in this case?) are not your users (support desk employees and the company's own customers). These three sets of people will all have different feature requirements.

Your design looks great. You mentioned that getmefast did it and I had a look at their portfolio which isn't as strong in my opinion as your design and UI. Did you UI designer have to change what they came up with?

Awesome story Girish, very inspiring and down to earth!Loved the simplicity and the way you approached product market fit! We as tecchies more often than not, deprioritize the part of finding out what the customer really wants. Thanks for sharing and Good Luck!

The submitted blog post acclaims MIT as a "national treasure" because it admits applicants to its undergraduate degree programs who don't have a high school diploma (certificate of completion of secondary schooling). MIT is not alone in this policy. The Common Data Set Initiative

who often have "home brew" transcripts (as my oldest son did when he applied for his undergraduate university studies last year).

Lacking a high school diploma issued by a government-operated school is not a barrier to admission to any of the better colleges or universities in the United States, if the applicant is well prepared for higher education study.

his advice to high school students about how to use their time meaningfully. High school students who take this advice to heart can get into a good college with good financial support if they want to, or pursue some other challenging personal goal if they would rather do that.

Honestly speaking, if he played around on an Apple II, this happened almost 30 years ago when the computer industry was still brand-new. Not to denigrate him, his achievements, or MIT, but the world is different now.

It's an awesome anecdote, and I am a big fan of MIT, but consider this my preemptive counter-argument to the inevitable, "Here, see, more proof of why you should drop out of high school!"

(though, after all's said and done, I do hope MIT is not too different from the MIT that accepted him back then)

Ed Fredkin has a somewhat more impressive story. He became an MIT professor without ever getting a degree â€" even an undergraduate degree. But by that point he'd invented a fundamental data structure (the radix tree or "trie"), worked at MIT for years on defense contracts, and made enough money off a high-tech startup to buy a small island in the Caribbean. Not metaphorically. He actually bought the island. He'd also been teaching at MIT for some time.

Speaking as someone who applied for MIT a few years ago, something like this is no longer possible and the "rat race" description used for comparision is now in fact valid for MIT as well.

Nowhere in the recrutation process you have much possiblity to show your "software code" - everything is very formalized and you have to submit your grades, essays on specified topics, pass the SATs and go through a interview (but the interviewer doesn't have to know anything about the discipline you want to study). Yes, you can describe your most interesting projects as part of your application, but if you read the admission blogs and other MIT materials, it is quite clearly implied that unless you have near-perfect grades and/or near-perfect SAT scores, they won't even look at the project descriptions, essays etc. Also there is no way of knowing why you were accepted or rejected, because the whole proccess is 100% opaque to the outside world.

I still think the MIT is awesome and the admission process probably has to look more or less like it looks like because of the volume of applications they have to go through. But the post and some of the comments seem to leave the impression that the MIT addmission comitee will look at every person as a "unique snowflake" to find the really outstanding candidates. In reality, the admission process has to be quite mechanical so that they can at all manage it and only after the initial 90% of the applications gets rejected, they can be scrutinize the remaining 10% in more detail. So, if you want to get-in, you have to "optimize grades and SAT" and "speaking French and Chinese, playing piano and painting abstract art" won't hurt either.

This sentence tripped me up. I vividly remember some of the more boring classes where you end up staring at the clock, for some subjects I actually tried to put in the least effort possible to achieve 80%. I wish I had those years back to do follow something I really enjoyed doing.

It's not so unusual, I was accepted into my Computer Science MSc (at Oxford) without a CS background - I did have a first class BA, but it was a joint honours in IT and Philosophy from a more-or-less unknown university (Lampeter).

Anyone who knows CS will know that IT is nothing like CS. I didn't have any A-Levels either. Masters degrees are a lot more forgiving, and I had some experience in software engineering.

This is the problem that I had when I was applying to colleges: I used to ignore classes that bored me but were required and instead spent time that should have been spent on homework, etc. doing programming side projects and learning CS concepts.

When application season rolled around, I had to compete with candidates who had a much shallow understanding of their area of study, but had a much stronger overall GPA, loads of random APs, etc. While I did mention my side projects and depth in my area of interest, I didn't think to submit code or the actual projects; I usually just mentioned it in the questions or essays (which I'm not certain anyone even reads). This lead to quite a few rejections.

I'm at Georgia Tech now and doing well, because all my classes, more or less, are related to what I'm interested in. While I'm very happy here, I'm curious if I would be as happy if I wasn't accepted to Tech, and were instead studying in a place without such abundance of opportunity. I'm sure there are others in similar situations.

Although arguably implied, there is nothing in this blog post that explicitly states that MIT is alone amongst institutions of higher learning in accepting a student without a HS diploma. Rather, it is simply demonstrating a particular example of just such an unusual occasion.

I'm not sure why everyone is reading into it so much: it's just a "feel good" piece, really, illustrating how one student's practical skill set -- here, coding -- was sufficiently talented to warrant a second look by one of the country's (best) universities. And, being a private school, they were willing (and able) to peel back their own red tape and allow admission notwithstanding his otherwise disqualifying credentials.

The point of the story is simply: here's a kid who was unqualified in the traditional, technical sense. But due to his obvious skill and intelligence in a particular field, a private school was willing to look past his technical disqualifications and, by its own prerogative, make an exception to its own rules.

This is most certainly why Berkeley and other public schools were unwilling to make an exception: they have less flexibility. (As someone who attended UCLA, I can attest personally to the stringent red tape of California's public university system.) That the blog throws public and private schools into the discussion demonstrates a remarkably cavalier oversight that misses the point entirely with respect to why, precisely, MIT -- a private school -- is the school that happened to grant the student the exception.

This is rare, but not unheard of; I can think of fiveish people off the top of my head that were admitted to MIT and Caltech without a high school diploma. All of the cases I know of are kids who just decided to leave high school without finishing their requirements, and went directly into one of the tech schools a year early.

The blog post mentions that there 'was no place nearby to go to high school.' That's really the issue in play. All of the 'MIT a year early' people I know about made a case to admissions that they had exhausted all of the resources at their schools and the time for MIT was now. The tech schools don't discriminate against lack of opportunity. If you're perceived as not taking all of the opportunities presented to you, though, you're finished. The post mentions that he took some community college classes. This shows a desire to learn and an ability to take advantage of the resources available to him. If he hadn't gotten a high school diploma because he was just too cool to be bothered, I imagine that he would have had more of an uphill battle.

Once again, the title of the post and content overstate / misstate a point and belie the reality. Many high school students apply to schools like MIT without having a degree -- they get the degree when they actually graduate, by which time they have already been accepted or denied admission by schools like MIT. Speaking as an MIT graduate, and one that was accepted early as part of the early admission process, not once did they ask in the application or in person whether or not I already had a high school degree. Of course I didn't - I'd get one when I graduated. When I applied, I was still a Junior. and I applied early. All I needed were my SAT scores, a transcript (which the person in the article had as well), and evidence of excellence.

I don't understand the point of articles like this that breathlessly trump one thing while the reality is something else. Colleges everywhere regularly accept people that have not yet completed high school. This is not just MIT. To say that MIT is somehow unique here misses the point. And yes, I know, because I went to MIT.

When I was a sophomore at the 'Tute I became friendly with a frosh who was a little different. He was from Texas (as I am, but that is not germane) and was 24. He had pledged the co-ed frat next door to my dorm where I used to hang out a bit, and always to play pool at their Friday happy hours. His father was a senior executive at a well-known semiconductor manufacturer.

He was certifiable on many levels, but a very interesting guy. He was working at Draper Labs within a month of his arrival on campus doing who-knows-what with some-unknown-level security clearance.

He had applied to MIT from a Texas state penitentiary where he was serving a six-year sentence for robbing a series of pharmacies and related misdeeds. Once he finished there, he started a different sort of prison. ;)

I recently submitted an application for the summer funding round as a sole founder. My one good friend who has been living JavaScript and CSS for the last few years is busy with his own company, but I am sure this is a good spot to meet potential partners. I call my idea StratoShare, and it involves a gateway for providing a uniform access API across users' data aggregations. The gateway would also manage a sharing graph for each user that would include those of their various aggregators, but would be independent of them. Share once with each other for everywhere, and manage it all in one view.

If you have some Web app chops and are interested at all, please email jmichaeltindell@gmail.com and I'll send you a link to my application and video.

I went to MIT without a high school diploma (and a few years early); I got a great score on the SAT standardized test, good recommendations from a couple of HS teachers, MIT summer camp grad student/professor instructors, and a hacker job I'd had (via the Internet).

I don't think HS is actually a major factor in the MIT undergraduate admissions decision if you have a plausible reason for wanting to skip it.

Just goes to show you can still be successful without an MBA, a bachelor's, or a diploma. So many successful people missed some part of standard education so I guess we all should since those are the ones we keep on celebrating.

I can't tell if I'm being sarcastic or not...The idea is to avoid the typical route and focus on building and execution, where the real world is giving you a report card and not a school. If you're good enough, you'll get an honorary degree or be accepted without the standard credentials.

I actually had a similar interaction with Apple on a smaller scale. I had just ordered a magic mouse for my sister's fiancee for Christmas. I talked to my sister after purchasing it online and she told me that they were in an Apple store the day before and he had mentioned that he wanted a magic pad.

Shit.

So I called up Apple asking if I could return the magic mouse that I ordered online for the trackpad in a store because there wouldn't be enough time with Christmas fast approaching. The customer support guy put me on hold for a minute and then told me that in light of the Holiday Spirit they would send out a trackpad with express shipping free of charge. I could return the magic mouse if I wanted or keep both.

Fed Ex ended up dropping the ball on the express shipping, but still Apple stepped up and made my day! I ended up giving him the magic mouse for Christmas and then the trackpad a month later for his birthday.

Great customer service is some of the best advertising money can buy. It's something that's been known for years, but hasn't made its way into corporate culture for a long time. Kudos apple/newegg/amazon/all the other startups out there/etc who've been successful with these principles.

People are actually returning their iPad 2s for reasons other than production defects? (If there were defects I am sure the blogs would be abuzz about it by now.) I know this one was Wife defect but the story says Apple is looking to see if there are any production defects.

I am pondering getting one and couldn't find one anywhere. To the people returning for refund of same amount - come over on eBay ;)

Supposing that it is true, Apple has paid a very small amount of money and received a (comparatively) very large amount of advertising. Why, they've been well placed on HN for quite a while now, for one thing.

Does anyone know if Apple has any sort of employee empowerment policy?

At start-ups, it doesn't (or at least shouldn't) take much for the decision makers to hear from customers and respond in a way that "wow"s them, but I'd be curious to know what processes or mechanisms specifically a large company like Apple has in place to catch these kinds of opportunities.

It's funny that there are people on this forum that believe husbands actually make decisions. A great quote from some random sitcom - "Marriage is all about compromise. My wife wanted a cat, I didn't want a cat, so we compromised and got a cat."

I feel really bad for the phpfog guys. But given the situation, I think they handled it admirably well - kudos to them. No software is secure and this could have happened to anyone. Especially startups who have to take shortcuts at the very beginning.

I know the attackers were just kids but I have to admit pursuing legal action sounds very tempting - even to just act as a deterrent to others. If they had just put up phpfogsucks.com, it might have been ok. But tweeting trash from their twitter account, redirecting their root domain to phpfogsucks, etc - are all not cool at all and should have some consequences.

- we were aware of the potential security threat behind post-deploy hooks and were about to disable them [...] but...

- we were days away from replacing this server

- They were a short-term stopgap measure we had been planning to replace

To me, it sounds like the real problem could have been stated as "We were lax on security," but almost worse than that is the lack of accountability that I sense from company. Yeah, maybe it won't happen again, but it's hard to be full of confidence to buy into a service like that.

I mentioned this last time, but I don't think anyone was interested, but the "John" guy is compwhizii (same handle on Twitter) who runs the forums (facepunch.com) for garrysmod, a very popular game. I will be curious to see how garry (owner person) responds to this, or if he already has.

The blog post is riddled with the words "luck" and "timing" which brings doubt into my mind that the team can actually take full responsibility for their actions.

"aware of the potential security threat " but they left it for the next week, who honestly here would do that?

I have also seen comments around the web of migrating to Php Fog because of how they handled the situation. If you are one of these people please enlighten my mind as to how you came to such a logical decision or how much you get paid per year.

Also if Php Fog could enlighten us on how their terms of agreement will work in the case where our intellectual property is stolen on no fault of our own.

Save your sympathy for the sites that are still down, four days and counting

It seems like incredible coincidence that allowed this to happen but when I think back to all of the security incidents I've been involved in, it always seems this way.

I guess the best way to think of it is that badness on the internet is like water. It will flow into every tiny crack in your wall you haven't sealed up tight. A crack in a dam doesn't leak less because its in an "obscure" location.

The phpfog guys really deserve praise for being so open on this issue. As a fellow engineer, being able to learn from their mistakes and see exactly what they could have done ahead of time to avoid the disaster is priceless.

Just goes to show that those with the time to spend are the most likely to break your stuff, even if you pay "professional white hat hackers" to test your system.

Goes to show you why the DRY principle (I might be stretching that analogy here, but bear with me) is important here - if you have old stuff lying around in production that was cloned a long time ago, you might forget about it and open yourself up to unfortunate incidents like this.

PHP Fog is doing great work to make the PHP ecosystem easier to work with, and I hope they didn't suffer too much from this mistake.

While it is admirable and good that they have learned from their mistakes and are taking steps to reduce the likelihood of getting hacked in future, to say "never again" is to paint a big red bullseye on yourself.

Wait...their model is an EC2 instance per customer? The normal limits Amazon imposes are 20 reserved or on-demand instances and 100 spot instances per region. You can request more, but will Amazon really accommodate a one instance per customer model?

Ugh, you shouldn't try writing an apology after not sleeping for days. Sleep on it first, always sleep on it. Talking about prosecution and explaining this with a framing that it was all a fluke caused by the only person who was silly enough to IM you with a confession... add one more person who will never be a customer of yours with an apology like that. Now I know you're irresponsible.

Seriously don't write official blog posts for your company while you're experiencing "I was just in the field for days trying to fix this stuff" emotions.

Calm down, then try and be graceful about the fact that you were hacked by a few clueless kids. (Clueful kids don't let you know who they are.) Then try and figure out how to protect yourself against people with a clue.

There is no doubt they did some things they should not have. And I don't doubt there can be a decent case built against them. But as someone who actually had something from his teen years come to bite years later, it's not pleasant. At least in my case it was a MAJOR maturing moment(also the worst day of my life). May be it will take a lawsuit to get these kids to mature up...to that extent anything that gets em to mature up before they really get screwed would be fair.

I'm not merely advocating another chance but actually something that gets these kids to be a tad more thoughtful about their actions. It's not always easy to do that when you are 16 and full of adrenaline.

Their response and abilty to turn the situation around is a case study in dealing with a difficult situation. Kudos!I'm saving their response and will use it when dealing with things. Being able to have a counter party to identify has definitely helped in handling the situation. I didn't realize how powerful that can be until I saw this, I learnt something new.

Its a brilliant piece and a great start/way to restore faith and recover from what must be a pretty grueling ordeal. Good job.

This post convinced me not to use PHPFog. They reveal more in their lack of foresight and security prevention measures than their response to what was otherwise a fairly trivial exploit. I am not sure this blog post was helpful in convincing customers like me that want to feel that their infrastructure providers are on top of things.

I am sure, many of the HN users here would have found at least a loophole in similar systems in the course of time. What I do in such situation is letting the service know about the flaw. Isn't that the ideal behaviour ?

There is no such thing as bad publicity! Kudo's for turning lemons into a viral blog post! Although, if I understand correctly, you were reusing passwords and storing them in plain text! This is an ABC123 computer security nono. Thank goodness it was just some young script kiddies and not someone with malicious intent!

Congratulations to PHPFog. They've managed to direct the attention to the 16 year old kids rather than their own incompetence.

Is it me or no one mentions the lack of expertise of the PHPFog team in PHP and Systems Administrations.

Sure kids broke in and the way they published their findings was despicable. The fact remains that PHPFog was utterly broken to pieces and the exact essence of the problem is simply the lack of knowledge in their field.

I am very disappointed by the tone of the blog post and think PHPFog don't really have a notion of what they are doing. I would much rather seem them where they belong, in the Ruby world where their experience is.

> Eliminate shared hosting failover server â€" We may never do shared hosting failover again if we can not guarantee its security. We might do a non-realtime failover to automatically launch a new instance for you, but this experience taught us what a bad idea this can be.

What does realtime mean in this case? Anyway, this isn't the only option. They could keep a few bare instances of their php stack online and simply run the deploy script instead of the image creation script. That ought to be able to run in under ten seconds I think.

Great to see disclosure. This can happen to anyone, and more so for startups, where labor is short, focus is on developing features. Using the phrase "Never Happen Again" is a bit strong though.Security is risk management; spend until you can accept the remaining risk while still maintaining profit and avoid being a hacker's low-hanging fruit.

great to hear all the details so quickly so that others building similar systems aren't in the same situation. as fellow PHP'ers its also great to hear that you are not blaming it on PHP somehow (no fuel for the php haters).

This feels like a business model where the lean/MVP approach isn't quite appropriate. A lot of things fall out of that decision, not the least of which is that the exposure surface area you get from an environment that allows user-sourced code on purpose is enormous. I feel for the guys going through this but there were a lot of errors in the wild all at once to allow this to happen.

Thank you so much for making this. I'm learning to program, and an intern at a place where I can't use my computer, can't install anything on their windows machines, and have a lot of free time. You just made my life a LOT better.

In a similar vein, people should check out Ares SDK from Palm for WebOS. It is an entirely browser based IDE for creating apps for WebOS, which are also written using their Javascript/HTML/CSS based APIs.

yogsototh thank you for submitting this. We are seeing 150 or so concurrent users on the site due to this at the moment. I'm retweeting some of the other online reactions we're getting at https://twitter.com/akshell_com

This is really cool. Your docs are well put together, and simple. It looks like you put a decent amount of time into them, which I really appreciate. Too many apps write the docs as an after-thought just before launch.

awesome work, but FWIW, the first thing I get in the git console for help is two lines of "undefined", and an internal server error for "lol" in the eval screen, using chrome on ubuntu. But you are probably being overloaded ATM so I'll just wait and try again later :)

Very cool, now if someone could just make a Javascript IDE that works on the desktop, I'm just beginning to work in node.js and do most of my PHP in NetBeans, I really want an IDE that recognises that a project can be JS!

Like many devs, I have my preferred IDE and I'm religious about it. And I'm fine with running my own server if it means I don't have to commit to a new proprietary framework; that's kind of a huge deal.

I can see the benefit to budding web developers looking to get started, but those are probably also least likely to be paying for dev tools. This seems to be your approach in the docs, though.

- Can you make the save-preview-reload cycle (much) faster? I found out that command-S triggered a Save, that's great. Does "Preview" have a keyboard shortcut as well? Could you have tooltips (when 'mouseovering' the toolbar icons) show the keyboard shortcut?

In TextWrangler (and BBEdit in the past), I have F1 as the "Run" item of the shebang menu. It even works with unsaved files; developing/testing in Python gets addictive: type, F1, type, F1, etc. (yes, yes, I think before I type... ;-) it's still nice to be able to quickly run your code..!)

This reminds me of an interview with former NASA astronaut (and current director of the Veteran Administration's National Center for Patient Safety) who related that most people don't realize that the astronauts who died in the Challenger accident didn't die in the explosion:

> There are still many people that don't understand that the crew of the Challenger didn't die until they hit the water. They were all strapped into their seats in a basically intact crew module; their hearts were still beating when they hit the water. People think they were blown to smithereens, but that's not what happened.

The audio is very fuzzy, but I think at the end he says something that roughly translates to "the former cosmonaut is dead"

Before that he says something about the people, I can't make out anything about heat or temperature. Apparently the people on the ground couldn't either, which is why you hear "mission control" asking him to repeat himself. I couldn't make out the word they asked him to repeat either.

This incident sounded familiar so I pulled my copy of James Bamford's Puzzle Palace[1] (1982) and managed to find it on page 215:

"Another high-priority target for the signal chasers at Karamursel [Turkey] is the Soviet space program. On April 23, 1967, a number of analysts were routinely copying the return of Soyuz I, bringing Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov back from twenty-six hours in space, when problems suddenly developed on re-entry. Recalled one of the intercept operators:

'They couldn't get the chute that slowed his craft down in re-entry to work. They knew what the problem was for about two hours...and were fighting to correct it. It was all in Russian, of course, but we taped it and listened to it a couple of times afterward. Kosygin called him personally. They had a video-phone conversation. Kosygin was crying. He told him he was a hero and that he had made the greatest achievement in Russian history, that they were proud, and that he'd be remembered. The guy's wife got on too. They talked for a while. He told her how to handle their affairs and what to do with the kids. It was pretty awful. Toward the last few minutes he began falling apart, saying, "I don't want to die, you've got to do something." Then there was just a scream as he died. I guess he was incinerated.'"

This is a chilling story. But such is the plight of man setting out on new frontiers of exploration: from Francisco and Columbus setting out across the seas, to Earhart's one way flight, so too will man flounder in his trek through the stars.

Look: explorers of all elements -- land, air, sea -- undertake their endeavors to accomplish a singular goal: the discovery of the unknown. An uncertainty of one's destination brings with it, therefore, an uncertainty of one's success and therefore of one's survival. And this is a risk that all explorers knowingly and willingly undertake -- it is a condition precedent to being such a brave traveller.

Accordingly, I think to shed so dark and negative a light on the several tragedies during mankind's nascent years of exploration is to miss the point and indeed forsake the very thing for which those pioneers lived: the furthering of our race, the advancement of our species.

Rather than mourn the loss of our fellow adventurers in their quest into the unknown, we should instead celebrate them, not only for their accomplishments in life, but additionally and especially in death.

After all, but for their risks, but for their selfless ability to consciously put their lives on the line both for their countries -- and indeed for our species as a whole -- and, certainly, to satisfy their thirst for knowledge and discovery, we would still be travelling the European continent on horseback.

As indecent as it may sound, I am certain our great explorers would be disappointed to see us saddened by their loss, and that they would far rather their memories be praised with all the pomp and circumstance worthy of their triumphant accomplishments, failures and successes alike.

So have been watching this on and off today and it's neat to watch the main concentration of downloads move with the morning hours across the map. Right now it's in Europe as everyone goes through their morning "Oh look! FF 4 released!"

This is quite a map/page. It reminds me the ApplemApp wall that was installed at WWDC a couple years ago where you were seeing -kind of- real time the downloaded apps from the AppStore, except they were not showing on a world map.Anyway this FF4 page is in a way a cool dashboard !

It's a natural fit for AT&T to buy T-Mobile. They both 3G GSM (UMTS) technology. T-Mobile is probably better in some key markets than AT&T, most notably New York (City).

The one issue with T-Mobile is it uses the fairly nonstandard 1870 MHz frequency. I don't know of any other carrier that does (anywhere). I assume this is because AT&T has the rights to the more common frequencies in the relevant markets? I wonder what technical and regulatory hurdles stand in their way for switching T-Mobile infrastructure to also do the "standard" frequencies.

Wireless really is a mess in the US. Europe and Australia have really benefited from choosing one technology (GSM). In the US you pick your carrier then pick your phone. Elsewhere you basically pick your phone then pick your carrier. Don't like you carrier? Swap your SIM. Problem solved. The US really suffers (from the consumer point of view) by this lack of carrier mobility.

It's my theory that US wireless is so expensive at least in part due to it being the most balkanized market in the developed world (and possibly the entire world).

I was hoping LTE would help alleviate this problem as it seemed to be on the road map for 3 out of 4 of the carriers (all but Sprint). Now I guess it's still 2 of 3. Sprint is still the odd man out with the (basically failed) WiMax technology.

I can see this acquisition facing some serious regulatory and legislative scrutiny.

T-Mobile customer service has consistently been one of the best customer service lines I have ever dealt with. Back when I had a Sidekick, I would routinely end up connected to a Danger employee sitting _at_ Danger HQ, helping me through teething issues on the early Sidekicks. For over five years, they have been extremely polite, helpful, and available.

From what I've heard, I won't get this kind of service as an AT&T customer. I'm sad to see T-Mobile go, but this merger always was kind of on the horizon.

This is complete bullshit, and would give AT&T an effective monopoly on GSM based wireless communications in a number of key markets. I say we collectively work to lobby against this deal, as it will be bad for all of us who are based in the US and looking to do ANYTHING in mobile. Imagine if Apple had tried to get their iPhone AppStore arrangement in a single-GSM carrier world?

Spectrum is the real problem. There is just not enough space for 3-4 LTE providers in addition to all existing GSM/CDMA carriers. We are solving this problem in Russia too, but with a different solution. One carrier (Yota) is building a shared network of LTE base stations and allows all carriers to sell it. Other carriers have the option to buy 20% of Yota five years down the road. Also, Yota agrees to stop being a carrier itself by that time. It's like energy grid, GPS sattelites or highway system. You better have just one utility and regulate it well.

I guess I don't understand how anti-trust laws work. Didn't they break up "Ma Bell" a few years ago specifically to prevent monopolies? And since then, AT&T bought Cingular, now T-Mobile, and they pretty much have a monopoly on GSM, if not on all mobile phones.

"We usually have to tell them that if they unlock their iPhone, it won't work. That it's going to be like a $700 paperweight, and that the antenna will fry itself on T-Mobile. Of course, that's not true, but that's what we tell them."

For the longest time when AT&T bought Cingular, plans that were entered into under Cingular were allowed to continue under AT&T on the same terms. Given how long ago this was, I didn't have data, so I can't speak to what would have happened with a voice/data plan.

However, I can see the same thing not happening with this deal. AT&T really is the antithesis of T-Mo in terms of pricing, flexibility, and customer service.

I've got both (an iPhone and a Nexus One). While 3G coverage is not as readily available on T-Mo as it is on AT&T, there have certainly been many times when it has been more reliable in call quality and drops.

The only upside to this? It is very likely the US will end up with unified GSM frequencies. We will see.

Are there any chipsets out there that could support both AT&T (1900) and T-mobile 3G (1700) frequencies? Since one of the main reasons for the merger is for spectrum, it seems that AT&T must be planning on utilizing T-mobile's spectrum in the future to improve reach and reliability, so it would make sense for them to provide phones that support both frequencies.

We have a company leveraging their government-granted-duopoly in the broadband marketplace to strengthen its market share in a closely related market (mobile phones). It's a good move for them ... They're stretching their net and once it's across the whole Internet, get ready to pay some real rent...

I will not give AT&T my money. As a happy T-Mobile user I am strongly against this purchase. I really hate that the US Cellular system is split by Wireless technologies and that my only options for GSM are basically AT&T and T-Mobile. Where will I go? Credo is great, but my phone isn't based on CDMA and I don't want to switch phones just because I switched vendors.

I don't think this is a good idea for customers. Even Sprint acquiring T-mobile is a bad idea, but this is much worse. At least with Sprint buying T-mobile you'd have 3 equal sized companies, but in this case, I wouldn't be surprised if Sprint eventually gets bought by Verizon, and then Americans will really be in trouble.

My mom is a pretty senior manager at T-Mobile, so when I first read this post I texted her about the acquisition. She said that there were rumors in the company that Sprint was trying to buy them, but she had heard nothing about the AT&T acquisition. Five minutes later she got the news break from the CEO. HN ftw.

Only three big companies. There's got to be a point when these mergers hurt competition. I like T-Mobile because it offers cheaper postpaid plans without a contract. I don't think AT&T offers these and their plans are generally more expensive.

I don't want to do business with a company that so willingly spied on American citizens. I just renewed a contract on T-Mobile. Now I need to see if I can get out with no penalty, and see who is left to send my business.

We were Cingular customers, then AT&T bought them. It was the only wireless carrier that offered a good signal where we lived. Slowly over some time after that happened, the signal started to get worse and come and go like with the other carriers we tried previously.

I'm not sure I'm trying to make a point, but I do not know what AT&T did with the Cingular. Did it use it's network? Did they just engulf it to remove the competition? Maybe someone else more knowledgable of this ordeal knows.

How will AT&T use T-Mobile after they acquire them? What becomes of the T-Mobile network that will soon by AT&T's network?

I guess this means that I am going to have to switch to Sprint. I really like T-Mobile. They are a great company and I loved their service and pricing. It is going to be sad to not have T-Mobile in the states anymore.

In one way this is terrible. And yet, I'm thinking if the situation gets bad enough, we'll finally see some changes that will forever dethrone these oppressors.

I'm thinking of a data-only phone that puts all of these evil companies out of the equation. All you need to provide data is wireless hotspots, and this can be done by small companies.

The only problem is who owns the fast fiberoptics. These fictional small companies could create a cooperative where they all work together to create their own infrastructure. It has worked for the organic food industry (Organic Valley).

This is terrible. I've had T-Mobile for 3 years now, and although I had terrible reception sometimes (granted expecting reception in an underground laboratory might not be so reasonable, but my sprint friends had it), the customer service and voice plans were A+.

ATT screwed me seven years ago and I vowed never to take their business again (from what I hear their customer service is still not much better), so I guess if this goes through it's goodbye T-Mobile.

I wonder how AT&T acquiring T-Mobile is going to affect Mobile Marketing companies in the US. Will Mobile Marketing companies be required to abide by T-Mobile's double Opt-In software policy or will AT&T keep its own Opt In policy which doesn't require a double Opt In for SMS subscribers? This should be interesting to see how this merger unfolds over the next 12 months.

This is devastating news to me. With TMO, my sister and I can add on my parents for free, get unlimited tethering, and unlimited family texting for $10. Knowing AT&T, I probably won't be able to keep this plan.

This is bad. In terms of freedom, T-Mobile was the only large carrier to oppose warrant-less wiretapping of Americans. In terms of cost, T-Mobile offered the best non-contract prices, and I could use my Nexus One or iPhone on their network for a reasonable price.

I wish they wouldn't use non-word characters in the names of their products. I thought ".Net" was bad enough when it came out - then C# and F#. But I don't even know how to type this. On this page: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/projects/co... they refer to it as Cw, CĎ‰, and Comega. The artist formerly known as incomprehensible.

This is compelling for a variety of reasons, but they're the same reasons i find Scala is compelling. But Scala has a syntax that is terser and less bracket-y (so far as i have seen), and is further a long as a language.

I'm curious how they see themselves relative to the capabilities of languages like Scala.

Like my advice for any programming language I think they should show their source for "Hello World" on the home page. Code snippets are worth a thousand words. Yields a good quick thumbnail feel for the language.

This CĎ‰/LINQ concept of unifying XML and object data access with SQL- and XPath-like syntax is elegant and obvious (aka intuitive).

Does it get much usage?

Most XML access is delegated to tools these days, and SQL is so familiar (and type-based access so unfamiliar), that it seems unlikely to make inroads on either - nor offer substantial practical benefits. That is: no order-of-magnitude benefit to overcome barriers to adoption.

Have you personally found LINQ beneficial? Has it been widely adopted? Why/why not, do you think?

To me, the most interesting thing about these comments are that almost nobody knows anything about greek nowadays. Honestly, people, you should at least recognize this from your experience at Uni at some point...

It is interesting that 16 hours after the post only 4 (or so) comments on this page has anything to the language itself. The rest, including the highest voted threads, are about the choice of the name :)

My main concern for this language would be (not that using lower case omega in conjuction with the letter C advertises looking at one's breasts or ass) that there is no room for specifics. It says it takes all these great qualities and generalizes them. Other than that, that brief overview makes it sound like something worth looking into.

Statistically speaking it would be flawed to use this to compare and prioritize a list of urls in order to rank them by interestingness/attention/etc.

The reason is that pages that have Facebook like buttons embedded on them are statistically speaking going to have a higher chance of getting shared than those that don't (such as Hacker News - which doesn't have such buttons).

I guess it depends what you might use this for, but to me it seems to only have limited value.

To write an effective resume you need to keep the audience in mind. The hiring manager will base about 95% of the decision on the answer to one question: What have you built?

Answers to questions such as "What are your skills?", "What is your philosophy?", and "What is your passion?" mostly just get in the way and waste the reader's time.

A flashy appeal for a job like this one might get the attention of Instagram, but they will not base their hiring decision on that. If the portfolio, which in this case includes the resume itself, isn't impressive work, they will pass.

Showcase your actual work well and present it in the most impressive possible light and employers will take notice even if you don't buy a domain name for every company to which you're applying.

Anything that makes you stand above the crowd of job seekers and get noticed is (almost) always a smart move. Do you think Instagram is thinking "no, this girl is clearly an idiot?"

No, they're clearly going to notice her and give her consideration that she wouldn't otherwise get. They're probably thinking "nice initiative" even if they've seen this type of application before.

I think a few of you are being too cynical about this being overdone. Getting a new career is a highly competitive race and doing anything that gets you noticed (and on the top of Hacker News) is always going to be a win for your career.

At this point, there's nothing innovative or quirky about "active applications." Especially if they're rather mediocre.

EDIT: After looking through the whole thing, I have to revise my opinion. It doesn't even qualify as mediocre -- copy and design are surprisingly awful. Large quantities of pseudo-charming nonsense ("I'm vehement about creating kick-ass interactions", "i can write a mean agile spec, and i'm comfortable working in a highly iterative environment", the complete section outlining why she's supposedly great for the gig) and completely interchangeable self-promotion. Active applications can be interesting if they're actually tailored to the company in question; this particular instance can't be bothered to make any meaningful connection to Instagram. Well, except for the domain name.

Kudos to her for putting herself out there, but she's misunderstood what the point of this kind of application is.

When you make a grab for a job like this, you underscore the fact that employers don't always know that there is something that can be improved - and that someone should be hired to do it.

I vaguely recall someone writing an application for 37signals, where he made some redesigns for the site that he thought were needed. (He made them - actions speak louder than words; deeds are better than words; show, don't tell.) In other words: "You need to improve these things - guess what, I can fix those problems for you." It must be what every start-up dreams of at night.

This is what these applications are intended to be about. Again, kudos for putting herself out there (I shudder at the thought of putting myself in the spotlight of the internet with my identity displayed and available for public mockery). But the application itself is very vague and will do little to convince the guys at Instagram to hire her.

I mean, who the hell wouldn't have an interest in working at Instagram? You are not a unique snowflake to have that desire - and it makes the attempt to convey passion less persuasive.

But hey: the site currently has 70 points on the front page of Hacker news, and a lot of new people now know her name. It's inconceivable that there is any "bad publicity" to come of this, so she can't really fail, regardless of what happens from now on.

Don't want to sound rude, but the lens ("I made this") has pretty bad type work. Kerning is off, the curve is not right (http://i.imgur.com/tpDqv.png). The drop shadow is also strange. Overall, there's not enough attention to detail.

While I like the initiative, I'm a little worried that someone who says she's a UX designer wouldn't have considered that most Mac users do not run their browsers full-screen, so there's a horizontal scroll bar for anything less than a 1024 width (I think it's 1024). That's not a good UX!

Unique is an absolute state. One is unique or not; there is no more/less about it. Per the dictionary usage guidelines, think about using something like: "rare, distinctive, unusual, remarkable, or other nonabsolute adjectives".

Sorry. This is my wife's pet peeve, and it has been drilled into my brain.

I think this is a prime example of "too much telling not enough showing." While I dig Netta's moxie and possibly would even hire her as a community manager, there isn't much here that wows me. Less than 200 Instagram photos and a lackluster design portfolio don't back up the passion and talent that she claims.

What's with the trend of public overdesigned resumes? If you want to work for company X, call your friend that works there and ask them for an interview. They will probably be very interested in speaking to you.

I'd just like to put it out there that when I run a company we will automatically disqualify anyone who tries to get a job w/ us in this way. So remember that if you'd like to work for me sometime in the near future.

It's not very often that when someone is offered a plum job with a company like Sony that they turn it down

Yeah, I get job offers like that a couple times a week. Guess what, I turn them down too. And it's not hard at all, because they are not offers of a plum job, they are an invitation to apply for a position.

It's not as if they offered him a concrete offer to create the next hot DRM component, just a generic offer for a generic software engineer role. If he would have gone down that path they would have had multiple interviews, mutual checking for possible team fits, etc... This is as generic as it gets, maybe one level above the generic LinkedIn message. Sure, it can result in a concrete offer down the road, but it's not as if a head hunter tried to get the hacker "by whatever fiscal means necessary".

This is like people "sticking it to the man" by yelling at the cable company representative - helps no one.

Good. After the geohot disaster, I sold my PS3 and all the games I had, my vaio laptop, and my flatscreen TV. I refuse to patronize a company that abuses it's customers like that. Apple may have a reputation for disliking people who hack their products but they realized if they pursue legal action against them, they'd alienate the core base of developers they rely on for the Apps they make such a big deal about.

This is the @koush referenced in the article. To repost what I said on reddit last week:

"To clear up any confusion, I was not offered a job, just an interview, which I declined out of principle.For those saying "I'm going to regret being principled", etc. Probably not. Android App sales have been more than good to me. Good, enterprising, devs should never find themselves short of opportunities."

I wasn't trying to "ride on the geohot wave to get 15 mins of fame". Without beating my drum too much, I've already achieved a moderate degree of it within the Android community. http://twitter.com/#!/koush

I had been tweeting about geohot's happenings for the past few months, and then I got that recruiter email. So I responded, and took a screenshot because the whole thing was a pretty ironic, and tweeted it. Then ~16000 followers made it go viral: http://twitter.com/#!/koush/status/46345951819993088

She probably read the email and thought: "Hacker? He's a hacker? We can't hire hackers! Good thing he told me straight away, he just saved us all a lot of time!"

We know what he means, but other people take the word hacker to mean something else.

If Sony came to this site and saw this article, they'd probably think the same thing too. If the email was sent to try and get them to change their ways, it probably won't have worked at all, since they might not even understand the meaning of the message.

I worked with Koush last year at Kiha Software (an Android software startup in Seattle). Currently, he is working on his own one-person startup http://www.deployfu.com/ which could be described as "Heroku for .NET (and other platforms)."

Good on him, but surely there's a better source than this? Lack of any real information aside, this article was painful to read. A twitter link to the picture would have conveyed just as much information without the stumbling, awkward prose.

I had similar experience long long time ago -- told the recruiter that I would not interview with Philip Morris and got back a blank stare. Nothing dramatic really came out of it, but it sure made me feel good.

PS. Oh, and Sony was not offering this gent a job, it was a simple "feeler". Google sends out these in droves, it does not mean they are sure job offers.

I work at SCEA, occasionally with Sarah on recruiting issues. Just want to put it out there that she's a genuinely nice person, and an ethical recruiter. Our internal recruiters reach out to folks like this every day. I guess she just got a bit unlucky on this one by running into someone looking for his 15 minutes.

Also, "reaching out" is a far cry from a "job offer"! You still need to be phone screened and extensively interviewed in-person before you have any sort of shot at an offer. Gotta make sure the candidate actually knows his or her stuff, and that they're not going to act like a complete asshole.

A job was not offered. Title and OA are incorrect. An opening dialogue attempt was made by a recruiter.

georgecmu's comment is good too. Those sorts of emails from recruiters are closer to the random snail mail you get from credit card companies saying "Contratulations! You're pre-approved!" -- just fill out this form with all your PII and we might really approve you. Maybe. It's a little better filtered than that, but not too much.

This article "Sony's way on Hackers, Innovaters and Makers" from Make magazine blog (which is down now, but I'll link to the cache) is a good run down of the various ways, before and up to the geohot lawsuit, sony has been attacking hackers and experimenters: http://bit.ly/dVmhC8

For those who say that this will never reach the ears of anyone that matter in Sony, it isn't their ears that matter. This has brought to light something that provides negative publicity to sony in the hacker community, and will make recruiting more difficult for them.

Basically, whether they know it or not, they are effectively being punished for their actions. The failure to recruit a few talented candidates that will read about this will harm their long term business success.

Having been at a startup that used hundreds of EC2 instances and EBS volumes I can assure you all that Amazon EBS performance is downright terrible and Amazon didn't inspire any confidence that they could solve it.

Even worse than the EBS performance is Amazon does not offer any shared storage solutions between EC2 instances. You have to cobble together your own shared storage using NFS and EBS volumes making it sucky to the Nth power.

EC2 is fine for Hadoop-style distributed work loads, and distributed data stores that can tolerate eventual consistency, that's all good. But for production database applications requiring constant and reliable performance, forget it.

Never fails: a cloud provider has issues with a specific cloud product, so clearly the cloud is an illusion that will crash down on you[1]. Any discussion about any cloud provider's product is obviously a chance to soapbox about the industry as a whole.

RAIDing together multiple EBS volumes feels like a massive hack to me. I can't help but wonder if this compounds the problem at Amazon's end. If EBS performance is a problem, Amazon need to fix it. For example, if some way of tying together multiple EBS volumes is a reasonable way of working around the problem, then why aren't Amazon providing "high performance" EBS volumes which do that under the hood?

If I were faced with EBS performance issues, I would see this as a big red flag, consider EBS unsuitable for the application and avoid it, rather than carrying on with such a workaround.

We've been looking at moving some or all of our stuff to either Amazon EC2/EBS/S3 or Rackspace cloud hosting, and it has been interesting.

Amazon seems more flexible, since you buy block storage (EBS) independent of instances. If you have an application that needs a massive amount of data, but only a little RAM and CPU, you can do it.

Rackspace, on the other hand, ties storage to instances. If you only need the RAM and CPU of the smallest instance (256 MB RAM) but need more than the 10 GB of disk space that provides, you need to go for a bigger instance, and so you'll probably end up with a bigger base price than at Amazon.

On the other hand, the storage at Rackspace is actual RAID storage directly attached to the machine you instance is on, so it is going to totally kick Amazon's butt for performance. Also, at Amazon you pay for I/O (something like $0.10 per million operations).

Looking at our existing main database and its usage, at Amazon we'd be paying more just for the I/O than we now pay for colo and bandwidth for the servers we own (not just the database servers...our whole setup!).

The big lesson we've taken away from our investigation so far as that Amazon is different from Rackspace, and both are different from running your own servers. Each of these three has a different set of capabilities and constraints, and so a solution designed for one will probably not work well if you just try to map it isomorphically to one of the others. You don't migrate to the cloud--you re-architect and rewrite to the cloud.

We were bitten by EBS' slowness at my company recently, when moving an existing project to AWS. You effectively can't get decent performance off of a single EBS volume with PostgreSQL; you need to set up 10 or so of them and make a software RAID to remove the bottleneck. It's a fairly large time commitment to build and maintain, but it's pretty fast and reliable once it's up and running (cases like the recent downtime notwithstanding).

Can anyone tell me if MySQL fares any better than Postgres on a single EBS volume? I wouldn't assume it does but I shouldn't be making assumptions.

We had consistent serious problems related to EBS for a several-month streak about a year ago, and I heard almost identical stories from other EC2 users around the same time. Instances with EBS attached would suddenly become completely unreachable via the network. Sometimes we had to terminate the instances, but usually we could revive them by detaching all (or most) of the EBS volumes, then reattaching and rebooting. Amazon seems to have fixed this problem, but I wouldn't be surprised if we suffered in the future the way reddit has.

Overall, EC2 is a very impressive offering, for which I commend Amazon. At times, I've been so frustrated that I'm ready to switch, but they fix things just quickly enough that I never quite get around to it. In the end, I'm willing to accept that what they're doing is hard, there will be mistakes, and it's worth suffering to get the flexibility and cost-effectiveness that EC2 offers.

Anybody care to comment on using EC2 with local (what Amazon calls ephemeral) storage and backup to S3? Seems to me the advantages are: it's cheaper and you avoid the performance and reliability problems with EBS. The disadvantages?

Generally speaking this is the sort of thing that people warn about when they say "if you want to run on a cloud, you need to design your application for a cloud". Meaning, you can't presume your infrastructure is dedicated and carries similar MTBFs of (say) an enterprise hard drive, which upwards of 1 million hours.

Amazon provides plenty of opportunities to mitigate for this, such as providing multiple availability zones. Reddit, if you read the original blog post, wasn't designed for that - it was designed for a single data centre.

OTOH, the variability of EBS performance is true, and frustrating. If you do a RAID0 stripe across 4 drives, you can expect around sustained 100 MB/sec in performance modulo hiccups that can bring it down by a factor of 5. On a compute cluster instance (cc1.4xlarge) it's more like up to 300 MB/sec if you go up to 8 drives, since they provision more network bandwidth and seem to be able to cordon it off better with a placement group.

I've never understood how people can use EBS in production. The durability numbers they quote are bad and they wave their hands around about increased durability with snapshots, but never quantify what that means.

Hard drives are unreliable and they certainly don't fail independently of one another - but the independence of their failure is much more independent than EBS.

With physical dives and n-parity RAID you drastically reduce the rate of data loss. This is because although failures are often correlated, it's quite unlikely to have permenant failure of 3 drives out of a pool of 7 within 24 hours. It happens, but it is very rare.

With EBS, your 7 volumes might very well be on the same underlying RAID array. So you have no greater durability by building software RAID on top of that. If anything, it potentially decreases durability.

You could utilize snapshots to S3, but is that really a good solution? It seems that deploying onto EBS at any meaningful scale is a recipe for garunteed data-loss. Raid on physical disks isn't a great solution either, and there is no substitute for backups - but at least you can build a 9 disk RaidZ3 array that will experience pool failure so rarely that you can more safely worry about things like memory and data bus corruption.

I was at the Cloud Connect conference last week. In a session on cloud performance Adrian Cockcroft (Netflix's Cloud Architect) spoke and said they do not use EBS for performance and reliability issues. They initially had some bad experiences with EBS and because of this decided to stick with ephemeral storage almost exclusively.

The guys from Reddit also spoke about their use of EC2. Apparently they are running entirely on m1 instances which suffer from notoriously poor EBS performance relative to m2 and cc1/cg1 instances.

I recently had an EBS volume lose data for no apparent reason. I'm not a heavy EC2 user at all - I was just doing some memory/cpu-heavy stuff that wouldn't fit in to RAM on my laptop and using EBS as a temporary store so I could transfer data using a cheap micro instance and only spin up the big expensive instances when everything was in place. I ended up downloading files on an m2.4xlarge because the files I had just downloaded to the EBS volume vanished.

What's the failure rate of EBS versus having direct access to physical disks? My guess is that at scale, it's probably similar.

Although you would hope that the storage components of AWS's cloud were highly reliable, I think the main benefit is not single instance reliability but being able to recover faster because of quickly available hardware.

I'll probably be downvoted for this but seems to me the root cause of this problem is Reddit's architectural decision to remain in a single availability zone. If it wasn't EBS it could have been some other issue related to the single AZ that could have brought the site down. Blaming EBS, particularly if you knew it to be a potential weakness in your architecture, seems like a deflection of responsibility.

Having been running a 200gb millions of transactions per day Postgres cluster on Amazon's EC2 cloud for two years now, I can attest to the fact that EBS performance and reliability SUCKS. It is our SINGLE biggest problem with EC2.

200gb really isn't all that big of a database. It shouldn't have to be this hard.

Isn't EBS intended for stuff like Hadoop job temporary data used during processing?

This kind of complaint reminds me of people who buy a product that does A very well, but then they trash it in reviews for not doing B. It was never advertised as doing B, but you'd never know that from the complaining.

For a data set in the mere tens to hundreds of GB (in MongoDB, if anyone's curious), is there any reason I shouldn't conclude from this that I should use instance storage only (with multi-AZ replication and backups to S3, both of which I would be doing in any case)? Moderately slower recovery in the rare event of an instance failure seems better than the constant possibility of incurable killing performance degradation.

(Edit: I hadn't considered the possibility of somehow killing all my instances through human error. Ouch. That probably warrants one slave on EBS per AZ.)

We released a dropbox-like product to sync and the back-end is on EBS. Yesterday we saw two times when a device got filled to 7GB and as it got closer it became slower and slower and slower. We did not have any instrumentation/monitoring in place and we were immediately suspect it was something on our end.

EMR is a mess too. The Amazon-blessed Pig is almost a year and 2 major releases behind, and the official EMR documentation seems to describe a version of EMR that doesn't even exist.

"Elastic" is AWS's claim to fame, but I am not seeing it.

Trying to resize an EMR cluster (which is half the point of having an EMR cluster instead of buying our own hardware) generates the cryptic error "Error: Cannot add instance groups to a master only job flow" that is not documented anywhere.

(Why would Amazon even implement a "master only job flow", which serves no purpose at all?)

The AWS business model is to sell shared hosting on commodity hardware. Cloud is a cool buzzword but it is still sharing hardware. Cheap, commodity hardware is the magic that lets you scale up so big and so fast for a highly accessible price.

But you're still sharing the same hardware as everyone else and its still just commodity hardware.

Hey, thanks for the shout-out and glad I could help in some small way. Sorry about spelling your name wrong :)

It seriously doesn't matter what you do, the moment you step off the well-worn path the haters will come out in full force.

Back in 2005, I had just gotten out of the Navy and I used to be a regular on a fairly popular forum. After seeing one of those dogtag impact printers in the mall, I did some research and realized they could do photo-quality engravings on then-current iPod Nanos. Since graduation time was coming up, I had an idea to sell personalized Nanos online (this was before Apple did free engraving, and before stick-on skins hit the market).

I ordered an impact printer on eBay for about $900 and did some test runs, which turned out great on Zippo lighters and the sample dogtags, but would always screw up on the iPod Nanos (I did mine and borrowed a few from some nice friends). I realized that the machine had a bent shaft and tried to get it repaired, to no avail. A new machine would cost around $2500, and the window of opportunity for graduation was already closing, so I decided to abandon the project and get back to software consulting.

Naturally, I posted about the whole venture on the forum, and oh man did they go nuts. It was like a shark feeding frenzy. At first, I got kind of mad that they didn't understand that I felt $900 was an acceptable risk to try out this idea, and that they were trying to troll me because they thought that I was beating myself up over it. In fact, the opposite was true, I was super glad that I tried it. I was just going to spend that money on a massage chair, anyway. I did end up getting a massage chair later, which they also trolled me about because it had speakers and an iPod dock (this was before Apple products were cool). :)

Eventually, I realized that they would NEVER understand the idea of trying out ideas until something sticks, and I realized that the forum was not only a time-waster but also an unhealthy environment. I stopped posting there pretty shortly after that (partially because they started e-stalking and IRL harassing someone else and I realized I was about one step away from that happening to me), but I still go back once in a great while to see what's going on, just out of curiosity, and it's pretty funny because they still talk about it. I guess fame and fortune have gotta start somewhere. :)

Why do Facebook app developers tolerate so much abuse from Facebook? This app to me seems like a perfectly well behaved Facebook app that is within the social spirit of Facebook, and during its moment in the spotlight a Facebook bot kills the app and the author's personal account, no warning, no explanation. From a business perspective I would discount Facebook as an unstable and unsupported platform simply because any app within can get pulled any time without warning or explanation.

Thanks for the shoutout, Daniel! Also, Stammy and I were watching Leno live when he mentioned Breakup Notifier in his monologue... it was St. Patty's Day, and I had about nine black-and-tans in me, so I went a little nuts on your behalf :)

In addition to the technical details, I'd like to know what sort of impact BN has had, particularly how things are going now. Have you been able to capitalize on BN's popularity? Is it still popular now that it's been reinstated?

Nice job. It could be said that there is and always will be a huge market for Stalking apps. I remember the days of icq/msn where there were apps that shows the who was invisible, who blocked you etc... With the proliferation of API's, social and open web, there will be interesting mashups or even privacy leakages. Something like "find 15km radiuous(4sq) where status is not relationship lookup(facebook) last.fm account whom listens Jazz and employed(linkedin)". Who needs dating services where all information is available?

You did not tell, was ur app ban revoked? How's it going now? Great post, totally inspirational and yes, take constructive criticism and forget the ones out there to destroy anything good being done. As long as you think it's the right thing to do, it is the right thing to do.

I spent a whole 8 hours this weekend playing with the Facebook Graph API for iPhone. Half of that was with no progress. The documentation sucks. The forums are barren. I've read post after post about breaking changes. What am I getting myself into.

I read about your blog.You're something that I would want to be like.Get in and create stuff just like that.I read about the comments surrounding your TC post.Don't bother about others mate.It's not about who innovates,it's who listens first and you did a great job with your apps.BTW I don't mean to say u didn't do innovation, just the whole steal/theif concept is bullcrap.I haven't used your product as I'm not on Facebook, so why not give it a thought about making it for people who cannot login through Facebook.

Great write-up, thanks for sharing Dan. Reading about your experience reminds me of threewords.me a while back, how it just blew up and spread virally through HN and the rest of the startup ecosystem. It's one of the great things about light-weight Facebook apps I guess, they naturally have mass appeal.

The Breakup Notifier also inspired me to whip something up to find out whenever someone removes you as a friend. It's my first Facebook app and I just wanted to get my feet w/ the API: http://friendsnomore.net

Seems like people would be interested in knowing how many potential suitors were watching their status and waiting for them to become available. You can envision this as the new status symbol. Instead of how many friends you have, it would be how many people are on your notifier list. In fact, some of those people being followed might jump ship earlier knowing that there are plenty of others waiting in the wings.

Specifically, this one uses inner shadows to generate things like the slider bars without background-image, and most everything else is CSS3 gradients.

The blog post calls jQuery UI's default themes goofy--I won't contest they look dated, but you can get from there to near-Aristo quality by 1) decreasing the border-radius in ThemeRoller to 3px or 2px 2) only using handsome gradient backgrounds and 3) adding some more CSS rules to just add some inner glow, box-shadow and text-shadow on the better browsers. In fact, ThemeRoller could be fairly easily updated to support such things from within the graphical designer.

For example, this app editor interface is pretty much all vanilla jQuery UI, with only the slightest of enhancements in a separate file so themes could potentially be swapped out underneath:

Hmm, curious why user-select: none; wasn't applied to these buttons. Not sure why you would want to let people select text on UI elements e.g. by double-clicking a button â€"Â feels less â€śnativeâ€ť to see selections made on UI elements.

The whole value proposition of Twitter, historically, has been that you can make it whatever you would like it to be. Are you Captain Nerd? Load up that stream with the finest of curated nerds and be soaked in their wisdom, go! Are you nuts about celebrity culture? Sports? Food? Just want to keep up with your friends and colleagues? You're covered.

The Dickbar is a violation of that understanding that needlessly undermines Twitter's brand and utility among the fiercest of its loyalists. There are many better ways to monetize the experience here. AdWords-style keyword based stuff being the most obvious, and most likely to be virtuous. Pitch me awesome iDevice accessories and apps all day long â€"Â I bet I'd actually care about them. Design sites? I'll check it out! Magic kitchen tools? Where?! Awesome restaurants near me? I will eat there!

Sports? Celebrities? Hell. No.

This is crass and it's a fuck up, plain and simple. Five years from now we'll look back and one of two things will be on our minds:

"Wow, glad Twitter rethought that garbage and built something that truly worked for both users and advertisers. What a powerhouse they are."

"Twitter? Was that like Friendster or something? I think I remember it."

It's a news ticker limited to one-word items, lacking any context, broadcasting mostly topics that I don't understand, recognize, or care about. It's nonsensical. At worst, it can offend. At best, it will confuse.

That actually sums up Twitter as a whole. Try as I might, I've never been able to shift my perception of Twitter beyond that and into something that could ever be useful to me in any way.

Look at the bottom 80% of those screenshots to see what the "real" twitter gives you. I can only assume that the author has subscribed to that content, and it's every bit as useless, to pretty much anybody.

I'd be interested to hear what 'normal', non-power users of Twitter think. The 'mouth-breathing buffoons' that Jeff Rock so denigrates (and evidently make up most of Twitter's users) may actually like this UI feature.

Viewing the world through nerd-tinted spectacles makes many things seem horrible that are perfectly OK to a regular person.

It's not just the dickbar that's offensive - it's the fact that its release along with the announcement that Twitter is going to try to limit the development of other clients against their API that really makes it distasteful.

I understand that they have a need to monetize - I get it, but to do so in such a ham-handed way really bothers me.

Am I mean for just not caring what's currently trending on Twitter? Feels like a similar problem to showing ads on blogs. I'm there for the content and the ad has to be exceptionally good in order to get any of my attention.

What I find interesting about this analysis is the fact that Twitter could presumably "fix" the dickbar by finding a way to make it 1)useful and 2) targeted to the user.

After years of Twitter claiming that they were going to find a way to monetize without resorting to irritating advertisements (and after billions of tweets) they presumably have the knowledge and ability to do this. The question really is, "do they want to"?

How Google makes money? More or less, they sell queries. They do not know the right price, so they let the market to figure it out. It works extremely well but they are able to flood someone with ads only about 10-20 times a day.

Twitter, on the other hand, is able to flood with ads all the time. Actually, they are able to push ads, instead of having to wait for a query. Twitter is able to auction with more "vectors", such as location, whole feed, followers etc. They do not have to do any information retrieval over this data, it is already provided with the structure.

Twitter does not have any privacy issues. It is already assumed that nearly everything you post on Twitter is public, so no one is going to screw them for using this. The data posted on Twitter is not sensitive, unlike Facebook.

Also, there is a huge value about the way they receive the data. They have a significant edge over the old web, as they get a lot of things before the whole world. What is even better, they do not have to pull this data, people push it to Twitter. They have data faster and they do not have costs related to crawling the web.

So, if for some reason they do not want flood people with ads, they are also able to auction immediate notifications about queries, the whole stream of tweets, some parts of it. They are able to set the minimum price of each auction so they offset their costs. Everyone focuses on Twitter as a marketing channel but there are many, very profitable, industries that live by the speed, die by the speed.

And do not get me started with the control they have over links posted in Tweets...

I agree with Marco Arment and Jeff Rock in that it is perfectly understandable that Twitter wants to monetize their business if they wish to do so, but based on their recent decisions it seems that they are taking a path that will damage their business along the way. Also, I have never understood the value of trending topics. It is just one of the many metrics inherent to how Twitter works, but it is far from the most useful metric since Twitter is so full of spam and people that have nothing useful to say (which is their good right of course).

Anyway, all this does make me curious to see how Twitter is going to change in the next few months and I hope for the best - for them and for the users.

"Am I supposed to tweet about it? If so, why doesn't the interface encourage that? Even if I hit the (effectively invisible) New Tweet button from this screen, my tweet isn't prepopulated with â€ś#michiganâ€ť, so whatever I say in response won't be included here."

The new tweet button is the same size and in the same place as in the rest of the application. Trying the button and it does auto fill the trending hash tag.

The rest of the article hits the point, but there is no need for these inaccuracies.

I deleted the twitter app from my phone as soon as I realized the dickbar was something I couldn't opt out of. Now I use hootsuite. Deceit UI, multiple accounts, and I can post across accounts and(something twitter doesn't do) schedule tweets to post at a later time. Twitter had made a serious miscalculation with the dickbar. They've reminded users there are other clients out there they can use. And if twitter decides to shut off API access for those clients, a LARGE percentage of people will simply stop using the service. I will.

I think part of the thing missing here with regard to the "dickbar" is "context". The short time I used the official Twitter client before changing to another one was that the "dickbar" had no relation to what I was actually interested in.

The UI was intrusive, yes, but what was presented was more offensive. Fix/soften the UI impact and make the "trending" topic more appropriate and things would be less offensive.

The "dickbar" is offensive because it needs to be. Costello knows that we'll hate whatever sneaky scheme to redirect our attention so he's probably giving us something to complain about first so that when they release the intended concept, it'll feel less offensive. Feeding ads into the stream would cause an uproar. Adding a banner will generate banner blindness. What better than to overlap the add with something we'd find useful but still sideband?

I think that many of the same people offended by the Quick Bar would be the same people that are willing to (and often do) pay for a client. What reasons could Twitter have for being averse to a freemium model in this area of their business? $1/month to go advertising free? I'd pay it. Since they introduced it, I've always found the trending topics area of Twitter to be the worst thing about it. I, like so many others, object to having it stuck in my face every time I open their app.

Is the sms -> internet/ server -> sms pathway tied up in business patents by Twitter? I am sure I am (sort of) underestimating, but Twitter seems like a weekend project for a couple of decent hackers; if they piss enough people off is there any reason to stick with them except for (VERY non-trivial) first past the post market share?

"The thief has since returned the laptop, in hopes of clemency in the form of the YouTube video being pulled. Bao has indicated, though, that he's not interested in cutting a deal. Instead, he's content using backup service Backblazeâ€"which syncs changes made to the laptop in the cloudâ€"to find access the guy's Facebook page, dig up PhotoBooth pictures he took, and generally let him stew in his internet humiliation for a while."- http://gizmodo.com/#!5784633/laptop-thiefs-ridiculous-dance-...

I absolutely hate this sort of vigilantism. How does anybody know that the guy in the video is actually the guy that stole the laptop? How do we know that he isn't just some guy who bought it on craigslist?

as an update, he got his laptop back (thief turned it in, perhaps because he knew he was caught). because he now has 2 airs, he's going to auction off the original and donate proceeds to japan efforts.

On the stolen laptop theme, I recently saw a youtube video by an Australian chap which went like this:

Tenant/house-guest (who is wanted for fraud in several states) ran off, leaving several thousand dollars in rent in arrears and in the process stealing three laptops.

FAB (the victim) gets some reports from friends a couple of weeks later that the perp is staying in a nearby motel. FAB goes around early-ish in the morning, knocks of the perps door, and the perp opens the door and the discussion gets heated. FAB is 'forced to defend himself' cough and after he finishes bouncing the perps head off the walls and is waiting for the police and ambulance to arrive (perp is un/semi-conscious), eh enters the motel room, recognises the three laptops, and puts them in the boot of his car.

Police arrive. Ambo turns up and hauls perp off to hospital. Police insist that FAB give the laptops to the motel manager, and they tell the motel manager to await further instructions.

Later that day perp checks himself out of hospital, goes back to motel, asks for laptops, manager gives them to him, and then high-tails it off to Victoria (the other end of Australia).

Moral of the story: police are useless no matter what country you are in.

Ultimately, the same sort of self-help Mark has used for recovery could be used by criminals for identity-theft against others.

How? Preload a cheap laptop with software to let you monitor it. (This could be made way more sophisticated, and hard to eradicate, than a online backup subscription.) Leave it somewhere to be stolen. Monitor its later use for information that could allow stealing many times the initial laptop value from its later users. (Those later users may in some instances be the laptop thief, but could more often be others who thought they were buying a cheap used laptop.)

This is a good reason to beware deals that seem too good to be true, when purchasing used computer goods.

I tracked down a stolen laptop using Prey (http://preyproject.com/) and Live Mesh's remote desktop. Upon having the laptop stolen, Prey notified my it was online. I remote connected, installed a keylogger and used that along with Prey's camera images to identify the thief and have the person arrested.

"The best part is that the person currently in possession of Bao's machine has no idea that the victim has access. For now, Bao's just having his "lulz," and doesn't seem terribly concerned with reclaiming his property."

I'm not sure Mark is the smarter one in this one. If the thief has been able to auto log-in as him and fill his browser history, this probably means that he can also read Mark's history and the rest of his home directory is lying there unencrypted, with his identity wide exposed.

I'd like to see him break Google up in to individual product "companies", each with their own office, corporate hierarchy, balance sheet, and near complete autonomy.

Larry would act as the investor, and anyone inside the company could come ask for money to found a new "company" or for additional funding. Every company would start out with some kind of "shares" to be distributed by the founders (with vesting, etc). If a company fails the people would actually lose their jobs. If they succeed the equity would be worth some proportionally huge amount.

I don't think any company has ever tried to truly simulate startups on a scale like this while maintaining the upside and downside of a real startup.

The one thing a billion dollar corporation can't do is be a startup again. There's too much at stake.

If you are truly a passionate early-stage founder, then the only option is to leave. Of course, Ellison, Gates, Jobs would never do this (willingly, anyway, in the latter case), because they'll never hit another homerun that big. If Page left it would be a pretty big stake in the ground.

One of the things I admire about Larry is that 'impossible' doesn't seem to be in his vocabulary. The challenges of having Google be more 'startupy' are many, some that immediately come to mind;

* Part of the allure of joining a smaller organization is that you can have a huge impact, creating a business from nothing to $10M/year is huge. At Google adding $10M/yr to the bottom line is chump change and you're a chump if that's all you can do.

* One of the great things about smaller organizations is that not only does everyone have a general understanding of the big picture, they have a lot of respect for each other too. Google has grown so complex in its execution that nobody could honestly claim to know how it all works, and of the few who come closest they can't scale to be as many places as they need to be. There is an inverse square law that your level of respect at Google is 1/Jd^2 where Jd is your "Jeff Dean" number.

* Start ups in particular get focus from solving a problem that is painful enough that someone will pay you for your solution, Google invents problems that nobody has and then has to give away their work to get any traction at all.

* Start ups can fire their hardware vendor, pick and choose their own software, build methodology, hiring practices. All of those things are mandated at Google.

Next up I'm afraid is a big poster imploring people to ask themselves, "Is this good for Google?" That would be sad indeed.

I know adults who would like to simplify their lives to get back to a lifestyle that is more like the one they had in college. That is perhaps equally difficult.

But he has learned that instead of arguing his case with Page, a better strategy is â€śgiving him shiny objects to play with.â€ť

At the beginning of one Google Voice product review, for instance, he offered Page and Brin the opportunity to pick their own phone numbers for the new service. For the next hour, the two brainstormed sequences that embodied mathematical puns while the product sailed through the review.

This was pretty much my experience with getting to choose my own GV number, albeit from a long list of "pre-screened" numbers. Had to stop myself from going through all of them (within an area code) in trying to find a number that was neat / punny / significant.

FYI this article is adapted from my book on Google out next month. There are generally two types of book excerpts: those that reprint a discrete section or those that draw from the whole to stitch together an article reflecting the reporting. This one is the latter--when Google announced that Larry would be the CEO, Wired (which secured the serial rights) chose to focus on him. I drew on anecdotes throughout the book, as well as interviews with Larry, to produce this.

"Page said, Google should enable users to answer one another's questions. The idea ran so counter to accepted practice that Griffin felt like she was about to lose her mind. But Google implemented Page's suggestion, creating a system called Google Forums, which let users share knowledge and answer one another's customer-support questions. It worked, and thereafter Griffin cited it as evidence of Page's instinctive brilliance."

A forum? Where users can answer each other's questions? What unconventional brilliance!

It's not like thousands of other companies have forums where users can answer each other's questions.

"Page reiterated his complaint, charging that it was taking at least 600 milliseconds to reload. Buchheit thought, â€śYou can't know that.â€ť But when he got back to his office he checked the server logs. Six hundred milliseconds. â€śHe nailed it,â€ť Buchheit says."

What preternatural powers of observation Page must have had to guess that a page reload took half a second.

In view of the bashing Alex Payne is being subjected to on another thread for advocating larger than "lifestyle" startups I found this bit interesting (emphasis mine)

"A few ingredients in Larry Page's stew of traits stand out unmistakably. He is brainy, he is confident, he is parsimonious with social interaction. But the dominant flavor in the dish is his boundless ambition, both to excel individually and to improve the conditions of the planet at large.

He sees the historic technology boom as a chance to realize such ambitions and sees those who fail to do so as shamelessly squandering the opportunity. To Page, the only true failure is not attempting the audacious. â€śEven if you fail at your ambitious thing, it's very hard to fail completely,â€ť he says. â€śThat's the thing that people don't get.â€ť

gives me hope he'll undo or at the least discourage some of the new bing-ification redesigns of Google Search and news. [rant] A bit of javascript hacking removed the new sidebar from the search page and restored the old classic "just a searchbar" look for me, but the new Google News redesign is terrible and close to unusable (and I don't have the time these days to attempt a JS hack restoration). I would pay to have the old design back.[/rant]

Google probably can't become a startup again, but it can probably start some kind of internal startup-like culture to spur internal innovation. If it "funds" groups of employees to essentially build an autonomously run startup (and rewards successes with $$$) it can probably save tons of money over the current acquisition strategy it has (many of which aren't really turning out to be great performers for Google).

> That was the reaction in 2003 when Denise Griffin, the person in charge of Google's small customer-support team, asked Page for a larger staff. Instead, he told her that the whole idea of customer support was ridiculous. Rather than assuming the unscalable task of answering users one by one, Page said, Google should enable users to answer one another's questions.

That explains a few things... I wonder why they they even bothered writing Google Forums, they could have just thrown phpBB at it and call it a day.

I think this is the first time I read an article that focuses so much in only one of the Google founders. So far you could only find stories about what the two founders did together, and little about their individual personalities. This kind of article is probably more attractive, and paints Page in a more similar tone than the one people like Gates, Jobs, etc. tend to be written in. Maybe this is a way to make Google look cool too.

Running the whole company as a startup isn't going to work. But what might work is to build several skunkworks projects within the company with their own CEO's. And if the projects are successful to run the companies as subsidiaries and offer equity (options for the subsidiary, not Google stock) to the people directly involved in the project's success.

I think the biggest difference between startups and established companies (even those that try to emulate a startup like culture) is the hunger for success. Established successful tech companies have already accomplished amazing things and may have cornered or even created the particular market they're in. They typically have several early employees who have made a fortune and many employees who are fairly well off from the company's stock purchase plan. Bill Gates lamented the fact that one of his employees wasn't quite as motivated as he used to be in the following quote (paraphrased): "something about a man changes when his net worth surpasses $100 million"

As someone who knows a significant number of YC folks, I have to say the most inspiring thing about the entire organization is how normal everyone is.

There's this expectation that there's "something different" that separates successful startup founders from "common folk". And it just doesn't exist. I think the barrier of intimidation is one of the biggest things most people aren't fortunate enough to experience.

Like I said, I know more than a few YC folks, I've interviewed (and was rejected) once from YC, and every person I've met struck me as utterly normal in most ways. They merely possessed a bit more experience and in general know a tad more than the average person.

There's no reason you can't do a startup right this instant. Do not let YC's rejection/acceptance dictate your path.

I don't know, for me it is a weird story of someone desperately seeking acceptance of his fetish named Paul Graham (in the text he mentions PG sixteen(!) times by name) and now his suffering is come to an end.

Sincere congratulations, though, Wilhelm, I hope now you can start living the life again.

+1 for finally getting in. From what you write, it seems to me that you got into YC at a point when knew the game quite well. The learning was in getting in.

So what's your take away from all of it? Is it the YC network and the resourcefulness of YC founders, or is there more to it?

PS: I strongly believe in the adage, "if you want to be smart, surround yourself with smart people". From that POV, I understand that being connected to YC founders itself gives you tools that would otherwise be inaccessible to you. Still I wanna hear that from you, since you're in a better position to ascertain that.

Great post that hopefully makes some people feel less need to get into YC. A great founder can be helped by YC, but would be successful with or without it. If you think you need to get into YC to succeed, you're not who they are looking for.

I have been rejected twice previously (1st poorly prepared, 2nd late) as a single founder.

Given PG's selection is based on startup founder's likelihood of success. YC's harsh selection process have really shaped my vision of my product to attack the problem domain from a different angle. I think they will train better founders.

Now, I am applying YC this session (S11),

- Finally i find a cofounder that i have know for 2 years that have perfect match in value and skill sets.

- I spend much more time preparing the application

- Also exponential more time working on the real business assets (design, code, project plan)

I should Thank them for the harshness, it makes you becomes a stronger, better fighter !

Wanted to thank you for this post; some of your quotes about co-founders describe the trials and tribulations we've already been through in the 6 months we've been working full time on our startup. Great read!

2. Scaling out, high concurrency and rapid growth? DEDICATED hardware from a QUALITY service provider--use rackspace, softlayer et al. Have them rack the servers for you and you'll still get ~3 hour turnarounds on new server orders. That's plenty fast for most kinds of growth. No inventory to deal with, and with deployment automation you're really not doing much "sysadmin-y" work or requiring full timers that know what Cisco switch to buy.

I simply don't understand why so many of these high-traffic services continue to rely on VPSes for phase 2 instead of managed or unmanaged dedicated hosting. The price/concurrent user is competitive or cheaper for bare metal. Most critically, it's insanely hard to predictably scale out database systems with high write loads when you have unpredictable virtualized (or even networked) I/O performance on your nodes.

Amazon claims: "Each storage volume is automatically replicated within the same Availability Zone. This prevents data loss due to failure of any single hardware component".

They make it sound like they are already providing RAID or something similar; however, the fact that things like this happen to Reddit, who have built their own RAID on top of Amazon's already replicated volumes, show that reliability is not a good reason to go with AWS.

I always love seeing a good technical post-mortem of what went wrong and how it could be fixed in the future...

I'm currently working on building a backend service that has to scale massively as well, and it has been a fun challenge trying to understand exactly where things can go wrong and how wrong they can go...

I had two machines running in east-1 last night and one of them went down around the same time reddit did. The other one made it through the night O.K.

EBS problems do seem to be the biggest reliability problem in EC2 right now. The most common symptom is that a machine goes to 100% CPU use and 'locks up'. Stopping the instance and restarting usually solves the problem.

The events also appear to be clustered in time. I've had instances go for a month with no problems, then it happens 6 times in the next 24 hours.

My sites are small, but one of them runs VERY big batch jobs periodically that take up a lot of RAM and CPU. Being able to rent a very powerful machine for a short time to get the batch job done without messing up the site is a big plus.

If you want to outsource who makes your lunch, fine, but if your whole business is requests in, data out, you do not put the responsibility of storing your data in someone else's hands.

I get it, Amazon EBS is cheap. But at the end of the day you've got to make sure it's your fingers on the pulse of those servers, not someone else who's priorities and vigilance may not always line up with yours.

* Needs to call AC_SUBST([LIBTOOL_DEPS]) or else the rule to rebuild libtool in Makefile.am won't work.

* A lot of macro calls are underquoted. It'll probably work fine, but it's poor style.

* The dance with EXTRA_LIBSNAPPY_LDFLAGS seems odd. It'd be more conventional to do something like:

SNAPPY_LTVERSION=snappy_version AC_SUBST([SNAPPY_LTVERSION])

and set the -version-info flag directly in Makefile.am. If it's to allow the user to provide custom LDFLAGS, it's unnecessary: LDFLAGS is part of libsnappy_la_LINK. Here's the snippet from Makefile.in:

> To ensure that your macros don't conflict with present or future Autoconf macros, you should prefix your own macro names and any shell variables they use with some other sequence. Possibilities include your initials, or an abbreviation for the name of your organization or software package.

* Consider adding -Wall to either AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS in Makefile.am or as an argument to AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE. If you don't mind using a modern automake (1.11 or later), also call AM_SILENT_RULES([yes]). Even MSYS has automake-1.11 these days.

Makefile.am:

* Adding $(GTEST_CPPFLAGS) to both snappy_unittest_CPPFLAGS and snappy_unittest_CXXFLAGS is redundant. See this part of Makefile.in:

Another incredible internal project open-sourced by Google. I really respect Google's dedication to improving the speed of the internet in general, and to open source.

Of course this benefits them as well, but it's a form of enlightened self-interest that, to me, is very refreshing compared to for example Microsoft, and other companies that only care about their own software/platforms and only release stuff on need-to-know basis.

I wonder if they had evaluated LZO (http://www.oberhumer.com/opensource/lzo/) before writing this. It is quite well-tested (a variant on it runs in the Mars Rovers) and very very fast: the author reports 16MB/sec on a Pentium 133, on modern architectures it should easily get to the 500MB/sec claimed by snappy.

When you can measure efficiency improvements like this in millions of dollars, I'm sure this makes a whole hell of a lot of sense. But for anyone below, say, Twitter's scale: is this ever an engineering win over zlib?

I'm puzzled by snappy-stubs-internal.h l105-118Why would one log by instantiating a class, not using the result, therefore leading to the destructor being called which writes the log message? Can anyone come up with a reason for this?

You should probably mention why someone would choose this library over another compression library. I think good advice would be to use Snappy to compress data that is meant to be kept in memory, as Bigtable does with the underlying SSTables. If you are reading from disk, a slower algorithm with a better compression ratio is probably a better choice because the cost of the disk seek will dominate the cost of the compression algorithm.

Myers-Briggs is one of the dumbest things in psychology. Psychologists, who generally accept the stupidest theories generally admit it's useless, and Big-5 is much better. It's only popular because it's so value-free - nobody gets offended by any of it's factors (except introversion-extroversion: the only useful one).

Introversion-Extroversion is the only factor that is really a big factor. There other MB factors - (Sensing (S) - (N) Intuition, Thinking (T) - (F) Feeling, and Judgment (J) - (P) Perception) are so meaningless nobody even remembers them. The other big 5 factors (Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) are much better descriptors of people. Are you interested in stuff? Openness ++. Do your homework on time? Conscientiousness ++. Say "yes" too much? Agreeableness ++. Crazy? Neuroticism ++. Honesty, intelligence, and empathy could be added; but they are a little prickly to measure. But Big 5 is still fairly descriptive of most people.

Personality traits are (roughly speaking) normally distributed. It's stupid to classify people as "extroverts or introverts", as most people are basically just "meh". Sure, there's the geek who never speaks, and the cheerleader, but most people just talk with a few friends, and feel a bit sick when they have to talk to strangers. The dichotomy that's implied by using two classifiers ("extrovert / introvert"), rather than just scoring "extroversion" on a scale of (say) 1-10 is just brain-dead.

"Introversion does not describe social discomfort but rather social preference". I like reading books, but in high school I could talk to anyone except a hot girl. Now, I guess I would prefer to read than make "connections", but that doesn't totally disqualify me for having a job that requires a lot of communication. Of course, I'm quite good at jobs that require a bit of thinking, and enjoy them more. So, um, I guess I won't be selling Avon any time soon. My loss, I guess.

And who says introverts aren't successful? I would pick Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Larry Page, Allan Greenspan (yeah, he caused the crisis, but virtually no-one else new better), David Letterman, and quite a few other successful people as un-extroverted people. Possibly Barack Obama, and quite a few other presidents too (but I know next to nothing of US history). Maybe Bob Dylan. Possibly John Lennon. Not Ringo though.

Having "social skills" can be important. But not all extroverts have them (think - the bully, Mr. Foot-in-mouth, and the guy who just won't shut up), and most introverts have adequate social skills. Most people do.

> Society rewards extroverts. They get the job, the money, the girl (or boy), and the front page.

I'm not entirely sure this is true. A lot of the top inventors, industrialists, writers, and artists in any generation are introverts.

What less people realize is that the most accomplished statesmen and politicians are often introverts too.

Augustus Cesar led the height of the Roman Empire, Tokugawa Ieyasu unified Japan, Abraham Lincoln crushed the Confederacy and led to modern strong-Federal America, etc, etc. All introverts.

Anecdotally, it seems like it's easier for an introvert to learn how deal well with people than it is for an extrovert to learn to enjoy the solitude and meditative periods necessary for serious hardcore expansion.

It's probably easier to become moderately popular and get external trappings of success as an extrovert. But if I was trying to massively change the course of history, I'd want the bulk of my top personnel in leadership positions to be introverts.

The author doesn't know the difference between introverts and extroverts, so this article falls completely flat. The difference is really simple:

* Introverts get tired when interacting with people and recharge their energy when they're alone

* Extroverts get tired by being alone and recharge their energy when they're with people

Extroversion and introversion doesn't say anyone about how shy or social people are. There are a lot of introverts with great social skills and a lot of extroverts with good inward skills.

That being said - it's obviously much more normal to be a shy introvert than it is to be a shy extrovert. It does happen though.

I'm an introvert and used to be a really shy guy with low social skills. In the last years however I gained a lot of confidence and social intelligence. Have I become more extroverted? Nope, I've just improved my social skills drastically.

The belief that how social people are is an unchangeable genetical trait is downright dangerous. Unfortunately a lot of people are misled into believing that it's unchangeable. It's just a skill like any other skill, it can definitely be learned!

I am highly skeptical of his assumption that skills like working on a team, communicating with others, and leading others all imply extroversion.

Now that I think about it, most of the people I've worked with (as a programmer) have probably been introverts, and excepting one or two, they've all had excellent team and communication skills.

I am an introvert (reading HN and programming on a Saturday night, and I have no problem with it!), and I am sympathetic to the idea that extroverts are a problem, but I don't think this article articulates that problem in a particularly convincing way.

However, being keenly interested in applied psychology I'd like to point out few things about your essay.

First thing that made me worried is that you actually didn't mention Emotional Intelligence. I'm not sure whether it was so known back then in 2005. You rely on extrovert/introvert factor to categorize people. The same what Jonathan Rauch did.

Very latest researches and publications tend to categorize people by low/high Emotional Intelligence (EQ), which is a good choice in my opinion. Note that EQ covers wide range of factors, but generally relates to understanding one's own and others' behavior. So this not only applies to dealing with any social interactions, but also to dealing with one's self.

You may now assume that introvert means low EQ and extrovert means high EQ, but it isn't necessarily true. I'm in one of very top high schools in Poland. And we have an AP Computer Science class, which has a program that is very similar to what is done on University on Algorithmics. Also we have analogical Mathematics class.

Obviously, we observe EQ drop when comparing these special classes to others. However we do not observe introverts/extroverts categories. Of course those extroverts â€" low intelligence guys are quite funny ;) , but that's not the point. The point is to show that there's not so much connection between EQ and being extro-/introvert.

Now, you are right that introverts are generally ranked lower in â€ślife/people categoriesâ€ť. That happens because emotions plays key role in human brain. They were introduced by evolution to help species survive, but now it turned against us.

High EQ people (not all extroverts and not only extroverts, also some introverts) know how to use this to help themselves in many life situations. They know how to negotiate, how to talk people into something, how to have great friendships and fulfilling marriages. In our times EQ became one of the most important factors in life.

So I believe we should stop complaining against people treating others worse because these others are introverts. Rather we should improve our EQ to be aware of our own behavior, of what controls us, because this is the way to living our lives better.

With equal EQ levels introvert and extrovert will be dealing with life very similarly, they both will be able to find a way in difficult situations. Unfortunately, extrovert will always have an advantage over introvert, e.g. extrovert will have more connections and that as we know is better in business. But it will not be that significant.

What I want to point out is that we need to help people improve EQ and choosing people by high EQ levels (observe them in social interactions) is not so surprising from the point of chooser. Fortunately, Emotional Intelligence is not something like â€śbeing tallâ€ť, which cannot be changed.

At last I'd like to thank you for this essay. I'm sure it is going to have positive impact on its readers. When hunting for those EQ guys we sometimes forget that there is also a place for IQ guys. And they are going to find it too. Also, they are in lucky situation, because they have high IQ, which cannot be changed and probably low EQ, which can (easily) be changed. The life would be theirs, only if they did a little to improve Emotional Intelligence.

The other day, I saw a discussion on reddit entitled something like "What is it that people actually do at parties?" I thumbed through it, not really that interested, but I had just been to a gathering the evening prior and had a small realization while thinking about it.

Quite simply, people talk about themselves.

There's some skill and filtering involved (you have to do things to have something interesting to say when you talk about yourself, and you don't want to focus the whole conversation on yourself), but the most important part of this epiphany was that I realized that growing up, I was always taught that the best way to be a conversationalist (and the best way to get girls to like you, and the best way to get support for your decisions, and the best way to get important people to listen to you) was to minimize yourself in the conversation and take interest in the other person, asking questions and responding with more questions...

and that this advice is sabotage, created by extroverts to make introverts easier to spot so the E's don't have to spend as much time trying to engage us and can just move on. It's like telling someone who has a hard time picking up skiing that snowplowing down the side of the run is just as fun as actually skiing, so they should just stick to that (and incidentally stay the hell out of the way of everyone else).

Extroverts naturally ignore this advice (or never see it, because extroverts don't need to seek out advice about how to engage others), and when introverts internalize it they further push themselves into a corner.

The most rewarding thing for me in extrovert situations has been figuring out what makes me an interesting person, and talking about it.

This is a classic misunderstanding of what a introvert is. It does seem to be true that introverts have weaker social skills than extroverts. This is not however, inherent! It is simple a function of practice, and as introverts need alone time to recharge, they are less likely to have practice in social settings. It's a subtle distinction but an important one to make. The article claims that people skills come "naturally" to extroverts, but that's an oversimplification of the underlying issues.

Put simply, the difference between introverts and extroverts is how they recharge energy. Imagine a party in a packed apartment. An extrovert can spend hours there and feel refreshed and energized at the end. On the other hand, an introvert will feel tired and drained. But this has nothing to do with how they act at the party. Being shy and awkward doesn't mean you are an introvert! This misunderstanding is fairly pervasive. I'm a huge introvert and I go to parties all the time. I act very outgoing, friendly, and confident. Close friends are in fact quite surprised when they find out I am an introvert at heart. But I could never sustain going to parties twice a week every week because I would get too drained.

I am very introverted. I always have been. The fact is that the unique challenges that programming and web design are suited to introverts. Can I be an A-list actor? No. But I can use the talents I have to make something from nothing. So don't try to change yourself to fit some idea you have of what you aren't. Embrace the personality you have and the talents you're given and make something amazing.

This doesn't make sense to me. I'm definitely an introvert: shy, lousy at casual conversation, and can happily go for days without talking to anyone. However, I have no problem in my software development job with teamwork, communication or leadership (I was even a manager for many years before deciding to go back to being a senior developer). I can work effectively with others to get things done, taking the initiative when necessary. And, as someone else pointed out, I've seen many extroverts who have poor skills in these areas.

This essay is ridiculous on a number of points, but the point that stood out the most to me is below. The author writes:

"I shouldn't have to say this, but there is a place in the world for introverts. Show me the ten most innovative minds of the 20th Century and I will show you ten introverts. From Einstein to Wittgenstein, not one of them could carry a conversation if you put handles on it."

I've noticed that I have the ability to go between introverted and extroverted (regardless of alcohol consumption haha)...

When I'm solving problems and piecing stuff together while glued to my computer I definitely get into a zone or mode or whatever, and don't really care for much outside interference. Most of the time it actually annoys me to get interrupted. But it only takes a few minutes away from it (sometimes an hour or two if I've left something unfinished haha) to get into the extroverted, outgoing talkative mode.

I've actually noticed a little bit of a curve in how well I communicate. The first few minutes after ending problem solving mode consist of me pausing a bit in my sentences (thinking ahead and seeing the conversation as a whole) and as time goes on I end up speaking very quickly and fluently without much thought at all.

Any other developers here transition between intro and extroverted like this?

What sucks is that it takes a few minutes for my brain to switch modes... because at work everyone probably just thinks I'm some really quiet, super serious guy.

In my childhood experience, 'collaboration' means that one person does all the work while the others screw around. Since no outside pressure is exerted to ensure that all parties contribute, this just amplifies existing social biases. If you put the 'cheerleader' with the 'nerd' and don't check in to make sure they're both working, all you did was hinder the 'nerd'.

The Tyranny of the Extroverts title reminds me of "The Smart Talk Trap" (stanford-online.stanford.edu/apm04csia/docs/SmartTalkTrap.pdf) from the Harvard Business Review which talks of these poisonous extroverts who excel in the language of "No, it wont work" and revels in shooting down ideas to fix something and not coming up with any actual steps to solve the problem. I recommend it if you havent read it already.

Other than because it's easy, what's the appeal of using stereotypes to create these supposed normative behaviors? Of all the people I've met in my life, most come closer to being balanced than not. We're all extroverted in some situations, and introverted in others. Maybe being divisive makes it easier to swallow the bitter pill of unrealized potential, but it's not productive.

As an introvert, I tend to agree with the author. Introverts generally make up the extreme ends of the population distribution in terms of being "successful", success being defined the way it is generally accepted. On the other hand, extroverts are spread out much more evenly. For example,the CEO of a big corporation might be an introvert, but most of the middle level managers are extroverts. Then there are those introverts who find it difficult to move up in the management hierarchy, for one reason or the other. I believe that those who are exceptions are so in spite of being introverts and not "because" they are introverts.

SHORT COMMENT: Hey hackernews, I'm a teacher/hustler looking for a technical co-founder. Let's build something together. Apply for this program. And worst case scenario, we don't get in but we have a kick@ss product we can sell to school systems.

EXPANDED COMMENT:I'm a long time reader of hackernews and I have never left a comment. But this was the push over the edge.

I am a math teacher in an urban school. Before that I ran a (very non-tech) business, and before that I was a business analyst (read documentation nerd) for the mobile technology division in a very large bank.

I have been telling everyone that will listen that we can save public education and make a bunch of money through innovation. All of our technology, frankly, sucks when compared to similar wares that are sold directly to consumers.

I am bursting with ideas and some I have already tested. But I can no longer work in a vacuum.

So like dating ads of yesterday here is my pitch-

Me: Undaunted math teacher in an urban school with 2 years of experience. Using data driven instruction my students achieved the highest passing rate in my school system. While I can't hack (YET!) I can sell water to a whale and snow to an Eskimo. More importantly I can take complex systems and teach them to almost anyone. I have rewritten documentation for our 3 most popular programs in my systems and I hold monthly workshops for other teachers where I teach them how to use the technology in their classroom. Plus I understand teachers and I have experience in market research. And did I mention, I am a fearless hustler?

You: A) Want to change the face of education. B) Build stuff.

So let's do like voltron. Team up. Build something amazing. And if ImagineK12 doesn't want us, lets keep moving forward and kick down our own doors.

Mr. Turner

P.S. You can reach me at BRODERICK dot TURNER at GMAIL dot COM

P.P.S. Last year my school system's revenue was 662 Million Dollars. The money is there.

P.P.P.S. A list of companies whose lunch we could eat with a good enough product and A WHOLE LOT OF HUSTLE=

Something built around the model that Khan Academy presents would be really interesting. Videos and learn at your own time. Home work help, helping parents and students find tutors, helping with test preparation. The long summer months are also a problem for a household where both parents are working. There is a lot of opportunity to help students here. Will be exciting to see what comes of it.

It seems Imagine K12 will/has solved the classic chicken-and-egg problem with education startups. I've been asking on how to get traction at schools online in different communities for years when I was working on a side project in this area. It's virtually impossible to sell to school districts, and unless pioneering teachers who are savvy enough to use something like Google Apps for their classrooms and see your product in the Marketplace or look for solutions on their own time while somehow fitting it in their already tight classroom curriculum and time budget, you have no way to gain traction from authority figures in the school system.

Enterprising students are basically they only way I've found that educational startups/sites can get active users to join on.

I'm excited about this program. Hopefully it will bring a lot more smart entrepreneurs and developers into the edu-tech space. It's definitely an industry that's in need of good talent, innovation, and creative problem solving.

Quizlet.com (Alan Louie, one of this program's founders, is an advisor) is looking for a few great people to join the small team in SF. If you have an interest in edu-tech (or just working on a web product that's helping millions of students study already), please get in touch. Email phil@[thedomain] or http://quizlet.com/jobs/

This is a really exciting announcement! Education is probably the most important factor in maintaining long-term competitiveness and the American system is in desperate need of improvement. That said, the hurdles in this area are overwhelming. To name a few:

n=1: my girlfriend is a math teacher at a better district in California. The only technology they provide her is a desktop with Windows 98.

So she uses her own mac to admin a tumblog filled with photos of assignments and answers to problems she uploads from her iphone. She uploads PDF's to google docs and 'shares with everyone'. She links to Khan academy videos since the school bans youtube and none of the district computers support flash.

Then her students use their home computers (if they have them) to consume this content. They're excited about it (most never heard of Khan before this) and it seems to be effective.

Back in the late 90's IBM installed a token-ring network at my high school. It was obsolete before they finished the project and the computers we had could barely get IE3 to load a web page.

So I hope this incubator does a lot not just to foster edu focused startups but to also get the right people in education to push for decent technology at schools.

The economy of scale here will be huge - if the founders of Imagine K12 build vertical expertise in promoting education startups (i.e. connections with schools, VCs who invest in education) it will be a lot easier for startups to do customer development and build/implement cool ideas. Our education system will benefit big-time.

Computing should be enabling us to start teaching physics and calculus and linear algebra (among other advanced subjects) in elmentary school. When I suggest such things to educators they look at me like I'm insane. But the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed.

In 1967 Seymore Papert was introducing elementary aged kids to LOGO. The turtle graphics in logo are differential geometry -- very advanced mathematics made completely accessible to young children. Papert's work in LOGO inspired Alan Kay and his colleagues to invent most of what we recognize in a modern computer: mice, GUIs, object-oriented programming. Kay's recent work to make computing accessable to children includes fifth-graders recreating Galileo's experiments and then building computer models of gravity to compare with their experimental data, then going on to apply their gravitational models to a simple computer game. That's physics -- newtonian mechanics to be specific -- made accessible to grade schoolers.

Think about it. Fourty four years after Papert gave elementary kids a tool to understand and experiment with differential geometry, we still don't see even LOGO among educational standards, or any programming tools. The culture of education has not recognized what a huge leap turtle graphics are for teaching mathematics. In the late 1970s Apple II computers poured into many schools and LOGO became widely available in education. But those thirty plus years ago a bunch of adults saw some pretty pictures, shrugged, and ignored it as child's play instead of recognizing it for the little revolution it really could be.

Moreover, Alan Kay and company have been actively pursuing educational technology for four decades and still no traction for computing in education. Four decades by the people who brought you OOP.

Education is a big mountain to move. I'd very much love to be proved wrong, though.

There is a basic problem with many of these ideas. Current research in education is showing that technology alone is not enough enhance student learning. In other words, putting a computer, device, method or software in a classroom adds nothing to test scores or student outcomes. (As a time saver, I'll let you Google up the citations). We have learned this far too late in education, having spent billions and billions in this area with virtually no return in concrete results. The trend is to use these things as fancy drawing and typing and adding gizmos that simply replace pens and paper: a waste of potential.

It is also true that teachers don't want to mess with more of this stuff. We are already beat over the head on a regular bases with the latest and greatest methodologies, books, ideas, etc. on a regular basis. Ask any experienced teacher about their faculty development meetings and they will just laugh and tell you about the last 30 years of innovations that were supposed to have changed education.

Here is what someone needs to do in my opinion. Ideas should include LONG TERM training (2-3 years) that is mandatory in their sales package, back it up with solid research, and provide a payment model similar to a lease or student pay-to-play (where you aren't hoping their newest principal or school board also likes the idea the previous group did). In other words, PROVE it works, teach teachers how to use it, and give schools a realistic way to pay for it over a period of years. If not, you're just another one of the 40-50 "latest and greatest" idea I've seen come and go over the decades.

This is fantastic, and aligns with a project my wife and I have been discussing. It's frustrating that one or both of us would have to hit the Bay Area to do it (on the wrong coast), but certainly going to consider it.

Two things which should be basic human rights and absolutely free, are: communication and education. But people wish to earn $$ off of them. And then they wonder why the world is in such a messed up state.

Kudos to Khan Academy and Bill Gates for patronizing and liberating the education.

"If we fund you, the goal will be to build a compelling prototype or demo to raise money from appropriate investors"

- Perhaps i'm a bitter competitor* yet shouldn't this read.

"If we fund you, the goal will be to build a compelling prototype or demo to raise the standard of education for all, inspiring a thirst for learning"

I'm skeptical to private groups with funds who want to invest in a lucrative market which is not purely based on "capitalistic ideals". To use a famous quote in context "Education is for life, not just for Christmas".

* One day! for those who know me and my snail like pace at getting to a version 1.